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CENTS. 







I Vol. 7, No. 847. Jan. 28, 1884. Anaual Subscription, S50.C0.. 



LIFE OF 




BYRON. 



BY 



PROFESSOR NICHOL. 



^ Entered at the Post Office, N. Y., as second-class matter. « 
SA Copyright, 188i, by John "W. Lovkll Co. ^k 



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LOVELL'S LIBRARY-CATALOGUE. 



4. 
6. 
6. 

7. 

8. 

9. 
10. 
11. 
12. 
13. 
14. 

15. 

Itj. 
17. 
18. 
19. 
■X). 
21. 
22. 
23. 
24. 
25. 
26. 
27. 
28. 

29. 
30. 
31. 
33. 
33. 
34. 

35. 
.36. 
37. 
38. 
39. 
40. 



41. 

42. 
43. 
44. 
45. 
46. 
47. 
48. 
49. 
50. 



Hyperion, Longfellow .20 
Outre-Mer, do .20 

The Happy Boy, BjOm- 

son 10 

Arne, by BjOrnson ... .10 
Frankenstein, Shelley. .10 
Last of the Mohicans. .20 
Clytie. Joseph Hatton. .20 
The Moonstone, Part I .10 
The Moonstone, Part II . 10 
Oliver Twist, Dickens. .20 
Coming Race, Lytton. .10 
Leila, by Lord Lytton. .10 
The Three Spaniards. . .20 
The Tricks of the 

Greeks Unveiled 20 

L'Abbe Constantin. .. .20 
Freckles, by Redcliff. .20 
The Dark Colleen, Jay .20 
They were Married 1.. .10 

Seekers after God 20 

The Spanish Nun 10 

Green Mountain Boys .20 

Fleurette, Scribe 20 

Second Thoughts 20 

The New Magdalen. . . .20 
Divorce. Margaret Lee .30 
Life of Washington. . . .20 

Social Etiquette 15 

Single Heart and Dou- 
ble Face, Chas. Reade .10 
Irene, by Carl Detlef.. .20 
Vice Versa, F. Anstey ,20 

Ernest Mai tra vers 20 

The Haunted House. .10 
John Halifax, Mulock .20 
800 Leagues on the 
Amazon, by Verne.. .10 

The Cryptogram 10 

Life of Marion 20 

Paul and Virginia 10 

Tale of Two Cities 20 

The Hermits, Kingsley .20 
An Adventure in 
Thule, and Marriage 
of M. Fergus, Black. .10 
Marriage in High Life. .20 
Robin, by Mrs. Parr.. .20 

Two on a Tower 20 

Rasselas, Dr. Johnson .10 
Alice; or. Mysteries.. .20 

DukeofKandos 20 

Baron Munchausen. .. .10 
A Princess of Thule. . . .20 
The Secret Despatch . . .20 
Early Days of Chris- 
tianity 20 

Do., Part II 20 

Vicar ofWakefield... .10 
Progress and Poverty. .20 
The Spy, by Cooper. . .20 
East Lynne, Mrs Wood .20 

A Strange Story 20 

AdamBede,Eliot,P'tI .15 

Do,PartII 15 

The Golden Shaft 20 

Portia, by The Duchess .20 
Last Days of Pompeii, .20 
The Two Duchesses. . . .20 



61. Tom Brown's School 

Days 20 

62. The y, ooing O't, P,t I .15 
The Wooing O't. P't II .15 

63. TheVendeta. Balzac. .20 

64. Hypatia, by Kingsley, .15 
Do., Part II 15 

65. Selma, by Mrs. Smith. .15 

66. Margaret and her 

Bridesmaids. .20 

67. Horse Shoe Robinson .15 
Do., Part II 15 

68. Gulliver's Travels 20 

69. Amos Barton, by Eliot .10 

70. The Berber, by Mayo. .20 

71. Silas Marner, by Eliot .10 

72. Queen of the County . . 20 

73. Life of Cromwell, Hood. 15 ' 

74. Jane Eyre, by Bronte. .20 

75. Child's Hist. England. .20 

76. Molly Bawn, Duchess .20 

77. Pillone, by Bergsoe. . . .15 

78. Phyllis, The Duchess. .20 

79. Romola, Eliot, Part I. .15 
Romola, Eliot, Part II .15 

80. Science in Short Chap- 

ters 20 

81. Zanoni, by Lytton ~0 

83. ADaughtc^rof Heth... .20 

83. The Right and Wrong 

Uses of the Bible 20 

84. Night and Morning... .15 
Do.,Partn 15 

85. Shandon Bells, Black. .20 
80. Monica, The Duchess. .10 

87. Heart and Science 20 

88. The Golden Calf 20 

89. The Dean's Daughter. .20 

90. Mrs. Geoffrey .Duchess .20 

91. Pickwick Papers, P't I .20 
Do., Partll 20 

92. Airy, Fairy Lilian 20 

93. Macleod of Dare 20 

94. Tempest Tossed 20 

Do.,PartII 20 

95. Letters from High Lat- 

itudes, Earl DufEerin .20 

96. Gideon Fleyce 20 

97. India and Ceylon 20 

98. The Gypsy Queen, 20 

99. The Admirals Ward.. .20 

100. Nimport, Bynner, P't 1 .15 
Nimport, Part II 15 

101. Harry Holbrooke 20 

103. Tritons, Bynner, P't I. .15 

Tritons,! art II 15 

103. Let Noth'g You Dismay. 10 

104. Lady Audley's Secret. 20 

105. Woman's Place To-day .20 

106. Dunallan,by Kennedy .15 
Do., Part II.: 15 

107. Housekeeping and 

Homemaking .15 

108. No New Thing, Norris .20 

109. Spoopendyke Papers. .20 

110. False Hopes 15 

111. Labor and Capital 20 

112. Wanda, Ouida, Part I. .15 
Wanda, Part II 15 



113. 

114. 

115. 
116. 
117. 
118. 
119. 
120. 
121. 
122. 
123. 
124. 
I2,i. 
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127. 

128. 
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130. 

131. 
132. 

133. 



134. 
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136. 
137. 
138. 
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140. 
141. 
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150. 

151. 

3i3. 
153. 

154. 

155. 
156. 
157. 

158. 

159. 
160. 

161. 
162. 
163. 
164. 



More Words about 

the Bible 20 

Monsieur Lecoq, P't I .20 
Monsieur Lecoq, P't II .20 
Outline of Irish Hist. .10 

The Lerouge Case 20 

Paul Clifford, Lytton. .20 
A New Lease of Life. . .20 

Bourbon Lilies 20 

Other People's Money .20 
The Lady of Lyons, .10 
Ameline du Bourg... .15 
A Sea Queen, Russell. .20 
The Ladies Lindores.. 20 

Haunted Hearts lO 

Loys, Lord Beresford. .20 

Under Two Flags 20 

Do. (Ouida), Part II... .20 
Money, Lord Lytton.. .IQ 
In Peru of his Life... .20 
India; What Can it 
Teach Us? M.Muller .20 

Jets and Flashes 20 

Moonshine and Mar- 
guerites - 10 

Mr. Scarborough's 

Family 15 

Do., Part II 15 

Arden, Mary Robinson .15 
Tower of Percemont. . .20 
Yolande, Wm. Black. .20 
Cruel London, Hatton .20 

The Gilded Clique 20 

Pike County Folks. . . .20 
Cricket on the Hearth .10 

Henry Esmond 20 

Strange Adventures of 

a Phaeton 20 

Denis Duval, Thack- 
eray 10 

Old Curiosity Shop .15 

Do., Part II 15 

Ivanhoe, Scott, P't I. .15 

Do., Partll - .15 

White Wings, Black. .20 

The Sketch Book 20 

Catherine, Thackeray .10 
Janet's Repentance.. .10 
Barnaby Budge, P't I .15 
Barnaby Rudge, PtII .15 
Felix Holt, by Eliot.. .20 
Richelieu, by Lytton. .10 
Sunrise, Black, P't I. .15 

Do, Partll 15 

Tour of the World in 

Eighty Days, Verne .20 

Mystery of Orcival... .20 

Lovel, the Widower.. .10 

Romantic Adventures 

of a Milkmaid. Hardy .10 

David Copperfield 20 

Do., Partll 20 

Charlotte Temple 10 

Rienzi, Lytton, Part I .15 

Do., Part II 15 

Promise of Marriage. .10 
Faith and Unfaith... ,20 

The Happy Man 10 

Barry Lyndon 20 



BYRON 



BYRON. 



JOHN NICHOL. 



NEW YORK: 
JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY, 

14 AND 16 VeSEY STUEET. 



<^ 32 



CONTENTS. 

♦ — 

CHAPTER I. 

Pace. 
Ancestry and famiiy ii 



CHAPTER II. 

[1788- 1808.] 

Early Years and School Life 17 



CHAPTER III. 

I1808-1809.] 

Cambrtdc.e, and First Period of Authorship. — House of 
Idleness. — Bards and Reviewers 31 

CHAPTER IV. 

[1809-1811.] 

Two Years of Travel 43 



CHAPTER V. 

[«8ii-i8is.l 

Life IN London.— Correspondence with Scott and Moore. 
—Second Period of Authorship.— Harold (l, ii.), and the 
Romances 51 



CHAPTER VL 
[1815-1816.] 

Marriage and Separation.— Farewell to England ... 61 



\ 



Vi CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER VII. 
[1816-1S20.] 

Page 
Switzerland. — Venice.— Third Period of Authorship. — 
Harold (hi., iv.).— Manfred 72 



CHAPTER VIII. 

[1820-1821.] 

Ravenna. — Countess Guiccioli. — The Dramas. — Cain. — 
Vision of Judgment 91 

CHAPTER IX. 

[1821-1823.] 

, Pisa. — Genoa. — The Liberal. — Don Juan 103 



CHAPTER X, 

[1823-1824.3 

Politics. — The Carbonari. — Expedition to Greece. — Death iig I 

CHAPTER XI. 
Characteristics, and Place in Literature 131 



BOOKS CONSULTED. 



1. The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron, Commodore, in 

a late Expedition Round the World, &c. (Baker and Leigh) I768 

2. Voyage of H. M. S. Blonde to the Sandwich Islands in the 

years 1S24-1825, the Right Hon. Lord Byron, Commander 

(John Murray) 1826 

3. Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Right Hon. Lord By- 

ron (H. Colborn) , . 1822 

4. The Life, Writings, Opinions, and Times of G. G. Noel Byron, 

with courtiers of the present polished and enlightened age, 

&c., &c., 3 vols. (M. Iley) ....... 1825 

5. Narrative of Lord Byron's last Journey to Greece, from Journal 

of Count Peter Gamba ... .... 1825 

6. Medwin's Conversations with Lord Byron at Pisa, 2 vols. (H. 

Colburn) 1825 

7. Leigh Hunt's Byron and His Contemporaries (H. Colburn) . 1828 

8. The Works of Lord Byron, with Life by Thomas Moore, 17 

vols. (Murray) 1832 

. 1830 

. 1830 

• 1834 

. 1842 

. 1869 

. 1870 

. 1872 

. 1858 

. 1878 

. X879 



9. Gait's Life of Lord Byron (Harpers) 

10. Kennedy's Conversations on Religion (Murray) 

11. Countess of Blessington's Conversations (Harpers), 

12. Lady Morgan's Memoirs, 2 vols. (W. H. Allen) 

13. Recollections of the Countess Guiccioli (Harpers) . 

14. Castelar's Genius and Character of Byron (Harpers) 

15. Elze's Life of Lord Byron (Murray) 

16. Trelawny's Reminiscences of Byron and Shelley 

17. Tjorren's Memoirs of Viscount Melbourne (Macmillan) 

18. Rev. F. Hodgson's Memoirs, 2 vols. (Macmill an) . 

19. Essays and Articles, or Recorded Criticisms, by Macaulay, 

Scott, Shelley, Goethe, G. Brandes, Mazzini, Sainte Beuve, 
De Chasles, H. Taine, &c 
2a Burke's Knightage and Peerage X879 



VI 



GENEALOGY OF THE BYRON FAMILY. 



\ 



BYRON. 

CHAPTER I. 

ANCESTRY AND FAMILY. 

Byron's life was passed under the fierce light that beats upon 
an intellectual throne. He succeeded in making himself — what he 
wished to be — the most notorious personality in the world of let- 
ters of our century. Almost every one who came in contact with 
him has left on record various impressions of intimacy or inter- 
view. Those whom he excluded or patronised, maligned ; those 
to whom he was genial, loved him. Mr. Southey, in all sincerity, 
regarded him as the principle of Evil incarnate ; an American 
writer of tracts in the form of stories is of the same opinion : to 
the Countess Guiccioli he is an archangel. Mr. Carlyle considers 
him to have been a mere " sulky dandy." Goethe ranks him as 
the first English poet after Shakespeare, and is followed by the 
•leading critics of France, Italy, and Spain. All concur in the ad- 
mission that Byron was as proud of his race as of his verse, and 
that in unexampled measure the good and evil of his nature were 
inherited and inborn. His genealogy is, therefore, a matter of no 
idle antiquarianism. 

There are legends of old Norse Buruns migrating from their 
home in Scandinavia, and settling, one branch in Normandy, an- 
other in Livonia. To the latter belonged a shadowy Marshal de 
Burun, famous for the almost absolute power he wielded in the 
t'.ien infant realm of Russia. Two members of the family came 
over with the Conqueror, and settled in England. Of Erneis de 
Burun, who had lands in York and Lincoln, we hear little more. 
Ralph, the poet's ancestor, is mentioned in Doomsday Book — 
our first authentic record — as having estates in Nottinghamshire 
and Derby. His son Hugh was lord of Horestan Castle in the 
latter county, and with his son of the same name, under King 
Stephen, presented the church of Ossington to the monks of Len- 
ton. The latter Hugh joined their order; but the race was con- 
tinued by his son Sir Roger, who gave lands to the monastery of 
Svvinstead- This brings us to the reign of Henry IL (ii 55-1 189), 



12 BYRON. 

when Robert de Byron adopted the spelling of his name after- 
wards retained, and by his marriage with Cecilia, heir of Sir Rich< 
ard Clayton, added to the family possessions an estate in Lan- 
cashire, where, till the time of Henry VIII., they fixed their seat. 
The poet, relying on old wood-carvings at Newstead, claims for 
some of his ancestors a part in the crusades, and mentions a name 
not apparently belonging to that age — 

" Near Ascalon's towers, John of Horestan slumbers — " 

a romance, like many of his, possibly founded on fact, but incapa- 
ble of verification. 

Two grandsons of Sir Robert have a more substantial fame, 
having served with distinction in the wars of Edward I. The 
elder of these was governor of the city of York. Some members 
of his family fought at Cressy, and one of his sons. Sir John, was 
knighted by Edward III. at the siege of Calais. Descending 
through the other, Sir Richard, we come to another Sir John, 
knighted by Richmond, afterwards Henry VII., on his landing at 
Milford. He fought, with his kin, on the field of Bosworth, and 
dying without issue, left the estates to his brother, Sir Nicholas, 
knighted in 1502, at the marriage of Prince Arthur. The son of 
Sir Nicholas, known as " little Sir John of the great beard," ap- 
pears to have been a favourite of Henry VIII., who made him 
Steward of Manchester and Lieutenant of Sherwood, and on the 
dissolution of the monasteries presented him with the Priory of 
Newstead, the rents of which were equivalent to about 4000/. of 
our money. Sir John, who stepped into the Abbey in 1540, mar- 
ried twice, and the premature appearance of a son by the second 
wife — widow of Sir George Halgh — brought the bar sinister of 
which so much has been made. No indication of this fact, how- 
ever, appears in the family arms, and it is doubtful if the poet was 
aware of a reproach which in any case does not touch his descent. 
The " filius naturalis," John Byron of Clayton, inherited by deed 
of gift, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1579. His de- 
scendants were prominent as staunch Royalists during the whole 
period of the Civil Wars. At Edgehill there were seven Byrons 
on the field. 

"On Marston, with Rupert 'gainst traitors contending, 
Four brothers enrich'd with their blood the black field." 

Sir Nicholas, one of the seven, is extolled as " a person of great 
affability and dexterity, as well as martial, knowledge, which gave 
great life to the designs of the well affected." He was taken 
prisoner by the Parliament while acting as governor of Chester. 
Under his nephew. Sir John, Newstead is said to have been be- 
sieged and taken ; but the knight escaped, in the words of the 
poet — never a Radical at heart — a ''protecting genius. 

For nobler combats here reserved his life, 

To lead the band where godlike Falkland fell." 



BYRON. 



«3 



Clarendon, indeed, informs us, that on the morning before the 
battle, Falkland, " very cheerful, as always upon action, put him- 
self into the first rank of the Lord Byron's regiment." This 
slightly antedates his title. The first battle of Newbury was 
fought on September, 1643. For his services there, and at a pre- 
vious royal victory, over Waller in July, Sir John was, on October 
24th of the same year, created Baron of Rochdale, and so became 
the first Peer of the family. 

This first lord was succeeded by his brother Richard (1605- 
1679), famous in the war for his governrnent and gallant defence 
of Newark. He rests in the vault that now contains the dust of 
tlie o-reatest of his race, in Hucknall Torkard Church, where his 
epitaph records the fact that the family lost all their present for- 
tunes by their loyalty, adding, " yet it pleased God so to bless the 
humble' endeavours of the said Richard, Lord Byron, that he re- 
purchased part of their ancient inheritance, which he left to his 
posterity, with a laudable memory for his great piety and charity." 
His eldest son, William, the third lord (died 1695), is worth re- 
membering on two accounts. He married Elizabetli, the daughter 
of Viscount Chaworth, and so wove the first link in a strange as- 
sociation of tragedy and romance ; he was a patron of one of those 
poets who, approved by neither gods nor columns, are remem- 
bered by the accident of an accident, and was himself a poetaster 
capable of the couplet, — 

" My whole ambition only does extend 
To gain the name of Shipman's faithful friend " — 

an ambition which, considering its moderate scope, may be granted 
to have attained its desire. 

His successor, the fourth lord (1669-1 736), gentleman of the 
bedchamber to Prince George of Denmark, himself living a quiet 
life, became, by his third wife, Frances, daughter of Lord Berkeley, 
the progenitor of a strange group of eccentric, adventurous, and 
passionate spirits. The eldest son, the fifth lord, and immediate 
predecessor in the peerage of the poet, was born in 1722, entered 
the naval service, left his ship, the "Victory," just before she was 
lost on the rocks of Alderney, and subsequently became master of 
the stag-hounds. In 1765, the year of the passing of the American 
Stamp Act, an event occurred which coloured the whole of his 
after-life, and is curiously illustrative of the manners of the time. 
On January 26th or 29th (accounts vary) ten members of an aristo- 
cratic social club sat down to dinner in Pall-mall. Lord Byron and 
Mr. Chaworth, his neighbour and kinsman, were of the party. In 
the course of the evening, when the wine was going round, a dis- 
pute arose between them about the management of the game, so 
frivolous that one conjectures the quarrel to have been picked to 
cloak some other cause of offence. Bets were offered, and high 
words passed, but the company thought the matter had blown over. 
On going out, however, the disputants met on the stairs, and one 
of the two, it is uncertain which, cried out to the waiter to show 



i 



14 BYRON. 

them an empty room. This was done, and a single tallow-candle 
being placed on the table, the door was shut. A few minutes later 
a bell was rung, and the hotel master rushing in, Mr. Chaworth was 
found mortally wounded. There had been a struggle in the dim 
light, and Byron, having received the first lunge harmlessly in his 
waistcoat, had shortened his sword and run his adversary through 
the body, with the boast, not uncharacteristic of his grand-nephew, 
" By G — d, I have as much courage as any man in England." A 
coroner's inquest was held, and he was committed to the Tower on a 
ciiarge of murder. The interest in the trial, which subsequently took 
place in Westminster Hall, was so great that tickets of admission 
were sold for six guineas. The peers, after two days' discussion, 
unanimously returned a verdict of manslaughter. Byron, pleading 
his privileges, and paying his fees, was set at liberty; but he ap- 
pears henceforth as a spectre haunted man, roaming about under 
false names, or shut up in the Abbey like a baited savage, shunned 
by his fellows high and low, and the centre of the wildest stories. 
That he shot a coachman, and flung the body into the carriage be- 
side his wife, who very sensibly left him ; that he tried to drown 
her; that he had devils to attend him — were among the many weird 
legends of " the wicked lord." The poet himself says that his an- 
cestor's only companions were the crickets that used to crawl over 
him, receive stripes with straws when they misbehaved, and on his 
death make an exodus in procession from the house. When at 
home he spent his time in pistol-shooting, making sham fights with 
wooden ships about the rockeries 5f the lake, and building ugly 
turrets on the battlements. He hated his heir presumptive, sold 
the estate of Rochdale — a proceeding afterwards cliallenged — and 
cut down the trees of Newstead, to spite him; but he survived his 
tliree sons, his brother, and his only grandson, who was killed in 
Corsica in 1794. 

On his own death in 1798, the estates and title passed to George 
Gordon, then a child of ten, whom he used to talk of, without a 
shadow of interest, as "the little boy who lives at Aberdeen." His 
sister Isabella married Lord Carlisle, and became the mother of the 
fifth earl, the poet's nominal guardian. She was a lady distinguished 
for eccentricity of manners, and (like her son satirised in the Bards 
and Revieiveri) for the perpetration of indifferent verses. The 
career of the fourth lord's second son, John, the poet's grandfather, 
f:;calls that of the sea-kings from whom the family claim to have 
sprung. Born in 1723, he at an early age entered the naval service, 
and till his death in 1786 was tossed from storm to storm. "He 
had no rest on sea, nor I on shore," writes his illustrious descen- 
dant. In 1740 a fleet of five ships was sent out under Commodore 
Anson to annoy the Spaniards, with whom we were then at war, in 
the South Seas. Byron took service as a midshipman in one of 
those ships — all more or less unfortunate — called " The Wager." 
Being a bad sailer, and heavily laden, she was blown from her 
company, and wrecked in the Straits of Magellan. The majority 
of the crew were cast on a bleak rock, which they christened Mount 



B YRON. 15 

Misery. After enccuntering all the horrors of mutiny and famine, 
and being in various ways deserted, five of the survivors, among 
them Captain Cheap and' Mr. Byron, were taken by some Patago- 
nians to the Island of Chiloe, and thence, after some months, to 
Valparaiso. They were kept for nearly two years as prisoners at 
St. lago, the capital of Chili, and in December, 1744, put on board 
a French frigate, which reached Brest in October, 1745. Early in 
1746 they arrived at Dover in a Dutch vessel. 

This voyage is the subject of a well-known apostrophe in The 
Pleasures of Hope, beginning— 

"And such, thy strength-inspiring aid that bore 
The hardy Byron from his native shore. 
In torrid climes, where Chiloe's tempests sweep 
Tumultuous murmurs o'er the troubled deep, 
'Twas his to mourn misfortune's rudest shock, 
Scourged by the winds and cradled by the rock." 

Byron's own aecount of his adventures, published in 1768, is 
remarkable for freshness of scenery like that of our first literary 
traveller, Sir John Mandeville, and a force of description which 
recalls Defoe. It interests us more especially from the use that 
has been made of it in that marvellous mosaic of voyages, the ship- 
wreck, in Don Juan, the hardships of his hero being, according to 
the poet — 

" Comparative 
To those related in my grand-dad's narrative." 

In June, 1764, Byron sailed with two ships, the " Dolphin " and 
the " Tamar " on a voyage of discovery arranged by Lord Egmont, 
to seek a southern continent, in the course of which he took posses- 
sion of the largest of the Falkland Islands, again passed through the 
Magellanic Straits, and sailing home by the Pacific, circumnavigated 
the globe. The planets so conspired that, though his affable man- 
ners and considerate treatment made him always popular with his 
men, sailors became afraid to serve under "foul-weather Jack." In 
1748 he married the daughtei*of a Cornish squire, John Trevanion. 
They had two sons and three daughters. One of the latter m.ar- 
ried her cousin (the fifth lord's eldest son), who died in 1776, leav- 
ing as his sole heir the youth who fell in the Mediterranean in 17.94. 

The eldest son of the veteran, John Byron, father of the poet. 
was born in 1751, educated at Westminster, and, having received ;; 
commission, became a captain in theguards ; buthis character fun- 
damentally unprincipled, soon developed itself in such a manner as 
to alienate him from his family. In 1778, under circumstances of 
peculiar effontery, he seduced Amelia D'Arcy, t!ie daughter of the 
Earl of Held r ;esse, in her own right Countess Conyers, then wife 
of the Marquis of Carmarthen, afterwards Duke of Leeds. " Mad 
Jack," as he was called, seems to have boasted of his conquest ; but 
the marquis, to whom his wife had hitherto been devoted, refused 
to believe the rumours that were afloat, till an intercepted letter, 



l6 BYRON-. 

containing a remittance of money, for which Byron, in reverse of 
the usual relations, was always clamouring, brought matters to a 
crisis. The pair decamped to the continent ; and in 1779, after the 
marquis had obtained a divorce, they were regularly married. Byron 
seems to have been not only profligate but heartless, and he made 
life wretched to the woman he was even more than most husbands 
bound to cherish. She died in 1784, having given birth to two 
daughters. One died in infancy ; the other was Augusta, the 
half-sister and good genius of the poet, whose memory remains like 
a star on the fringe of a thunder-cloud, only brighter by the pass- 
ing of the smoke of calumny. In 1807 she married Colonel Leigh, 
and had a numerous family, most of whom died young. Her eldest 
daughter, Georgiana, married Mr. Henry Trevanion. The fourth, 
Medora, had an unfortunate history, the nucleus of an impertinent 
and happily ephemeral romance. 

The year after the death of his first wife, John Byron, who 
seems to have had the fascinations of a Barry Lyndon, succeeded 
in entrapping a second. This was Miss Catherine Gordon of 
Gight, a lady with considerable estates in Aberdeenshire — which 
attracted the adventurer — and an overweening Highland pride in 
her descent from James L, the greatest of the Stuarts, through his 
daughter Annabella, and the second Earl of Huntly. This unioii 
suggested the ballad of an old rhymer, beginning — 

" O whare are ye gaen, bonny Miss Gordon, 
O whare are ye gaen, sae bonny and braw } 
Ye've married, ye've married wi' Johnny Byron, 
To squander the lands o' Gight awa." 

The prophecy was soon fulfilled. The property of the Scotch 
heiress was squandered with impetuous rapidity by the Enghsh 
rake. In 1786 she left Scotland for France, and returned to Eng- 
land towards the close of the following year. On the 22nd of 
January, 1788, in Holies Street, London, Mrs. Byron gave birth to 
her only child, George Gordon, sixth lord. Shortly after, being 
pressed by his creditors, the father abandoned both, and leaving 
them with a pittance of 1 50/. a year, tied to Valenciennes, where he 
died, in August, 1791. 



BYRON. 21 

Byron's allusions to Scotland are variable and inconsistent. 
His satire on her reviewers was sharpened by the show of national 
as well as personal antipathy ; and when, about the time of its pro- 
duction, a young lady remarked that he had a btt e of the northern 
manner of speech, he burst out, " Good God ! I hope not. I would 
rather the whole d— d country was sunk in the sea. I the i^cotch 
accent!" But in the passage from which we have quoted the 
swirl of feeling on the other side continues,— 

" I rail'd at Scots to show my wrath and wit, 
Which must be own'd was sensidve and surly. 
Yet 'tis in vain such sallies to permit ; 
They cannot quench young feelings, fresh and early. 
I scotch'd, not kill'd, the Scotchman in my blood, 
And love the land of mountain and of flood." 

This su-ygests a few words on a question of more than local in- 
terest. Bymn's most careful biographer has said of him : " Al- 
thoucrh on his first expedition to Greece he was dressed in the tar- 
tan o1 the Gordon clan, yet the whole bent of his mind, and the 
character of his poetry, are anything but Scottish. Scottish na- 
tionality is tainted with narrow and provincial elements. hJyron s 
poetic character, on the other hand, is universal and cosmopolitan. 
H- had no attachment to localities, and never devoted himself to 
the study of the history of Scotland and its romantic legends." 
Somewhat similarly Thomas Campbell remarks of Burns, "He 
was the most un-Scotsmanlike of Scotchmen, having no caution." 
Rough national verdicts are apt to be superficial. Mr. Leslie 
Stephen, in a review of Hawthorne, has commented on the extent 
to which the nobler qualities and conquering energy of the English 
character are hidden, not only from foreigners, but from ourselves, 
by the " detestable lay figure " of John Bull. In like manner, the 
obtrusive type of the " canny Scot " is apt to make critics forget 
the hot heart that has marked the early annals of the country, from 
the Hebrides to the Borders, with so much violence, and at the 
same time has been the source of so much strong feeling and per- 
sistent purpose. Of late years, the struggle for existence, the 
temptations of a too ambitious and over-active people in the race 
for wealth, and the benumbing effect of the constant profession of 
beliefs that have ceased to be sincere, have for the most part stifled 
the fervid fire in calculating prudence. These qualities have been 
adequately combined in Scott alone, the one massive and com- 
plete literary type of his race. Burns, to his ruin, had only the 
fire : the same is true of Byron, whose genius, in some respects 
less orenuine, was indefinitely and inevitably wider His intensely 
susceptible nature took a dve from every scene, city, and society 
through which he passed ; but to the last he bore with him the 
marks of a descendant of the Sea-Kings, and of the mad Gordons 
in .whose domains he had first learned to listen to the sound of 
the " two mighty voices " that hK-^ated and inspired him through 
life. 



22 BYRON. 

In the autumn of 1798 the family, /.<?., his mother — who had 

sold the whole of her houseliold furniture for 75/.— with himself, 
and a maid, set south. The poet's only recorded impression of 
the journey is a gleam of Loch Leven, to which he refers in one 
of his latest letters. He never revisited the land of his birth. 
Our next glimpse of him is on his passing the toll-bar of Newstead. 
Mrs. Byron asked the old woman who kept it, " Who is the next 
heir ? " and on her answer " They say it is a little boy who lives 
rJ: Ab.erdeen," " This is he, bless him ! " exclaimed the nurse. 

Returned to the ancestral Abbey, and finding it half ruined 
and desolate, they migrated for a time to the neighbouring Not- 
tingham. Here the child's first experience was another course of 
surgical torture. He was placed under the charge of a quack 
named Lavender, who rubbed his foot in oil, and screwed it about 
in wooden machines. This useless treatment is associated with 
two characteristic anecdotes. One relates to the endurance which 
Byron, on every occasion of mere physical trial, was capable of 
displaying. Mr. Rogers, a private tutor, with whom he was read- 
ing passages of Virgil and Cicero, remarked, "It makes me un- 
comfortable, my lord, to see you sitting there in such pain as I 
know you must be suffering. " Never mind, Mr. Rogers," said 
the child, "3-ou shall not see any signs of it in me." The other 
illustrates his precocious delight in detecting imposture. Having 
scribbled on a piece of paper several lines of mere gibberish, he 
brought them to Lavender, and gravely asked what language it 
was ; and on receiving the answer, " It is Italian," he broke into 
an exultant laugh at the expense of his tormentor. Another 
story survives, of his vindictive spirit giving birth to his first 
rhymes. A meddling old lady, who used to visit his mother and 
was possessed of a curious belief in a future transmigration to our 
satellite — the bleakness of whose scenery she had not realised — 
having given him some cause of offence, he stormed out to his 
nurse that he " could not bear the sight of the witch," and vented 
his wrath in the couplet, — 

" In Nottingham county there lives, at Swan Green, 
As curst an old lady as ever was seen ; 
And when she does die, which I hope will be soon, 
The firmly believes she will go to the moon." 

The poet himself dates his "first dash into poetry " a year 
later (1800), from his juvenile passion for his cousin Margaret 
Parker, whose subsequent death from an injury caused by a fall 
he afterwards deplored in a forgotten elegy. " I do not recollect," 
he writes through the transfiguring mists of memory, "anything 
equal to the transparent beauty of my cousin, or to the sweetness 
of her temper, during the short period of our intimacy. She looked 
as if she had been made out of a rainbow — all beauty and peace. 
My passion had the usual effects upon me — I could not sleep ; I 
could not eat ; I could not rest. It was the texture of my life to 
think of the time that must elapse before we could meet again. 



B YRON. 



23 



But I was a fool then, and not much wiser now." Sic transit 
secunda. 

The departure at a somewhat earlier date of May Gray for her 
native country gave rise to evidence of another kind of affection. 
On her leaving, he presented her with his first watch, and a minia- 
ture by Kay, of Edinburgh, representing him with a bow and arrow 
in his hand and a profusion of hair over his shoulders. He con- 
tinued to correspond with her at intervals. Byron was always be- 
loved by his servants. This nurse afterwards married well, and 
during her last illness, in 1827, communicated to her attendant, Dr. 
Ew'.ng, of Aberdeen, recollections of the poet, from which his biog- 
raphers have drawn. 

In the summer of 1799 he was sent to London, entrusted to the 
medical care of Dr. Baillie (brother of Joanna, the dramatist), and 
placed in a boarding school at Dulwich, under the charge of Dr. 
Glennie. The physician advised a moderation in athletic sports, 
which the patient in his hours of liberty was constantly apt to ex- 
ceed. The teacher — who continued to cherish an affectionate re- 
membrance of his pupil, even when he was told, on a visit to Geneva 
in 1817, that he ought to have "made abetter boy of him " — testifies 
to the alacrity with which he entered on his tasks, his playful good- 
humour with his comrades, his reading in history beyond his age, 
and his intimate acquaintance with the Scriptures. " In my study," 
he states, "he found many books open to him; among others, a 
set of our poets from Chaucer to Churchill, which I am almost 
tempted to say he had more than once perused from beginning to 
end." One of the books referred to was the Narrative of the 
Shipwreck of the " funo^'' which contains, almost word for word, 
the account of the " two fathers," in Don Juan. Meanwhile Mrs. 
Byron — whose reduced income had been opportunely augmented 
by a grant of a 300/. annuity from the Civil List— after revisiting 
Newstead, followed her son to London, and took up her residence 
irt a house in Sloane-terrace. She was in the habit of having him 
with her there from Saturday to Monday, kept him from school for 
weeks, introduced him to idle company, and in other ways was con- 
tinually hampering his progress. 

Byron on his accession to the peerage, having become a ward 
in Chancery, was handed over by the Court to the guardianship of 
Lord Carlisle, nephew of the admiral, and son of the grand-aunt of 
the poet. Like his mother, this earl aspired to be a poet, and liis 
tragedy. The Father's Revenue, received some commendation from 
Dr. Johnson ; but his relations with his illustrious kinsman were 
from the first unsatisfactory. In answer to Dr. Glennie's appeal, 
he exerted his authority against the interruptions to his ward's 
education ; but the attempt to mend matters led to such outrageous 
exhibitions of temper that he said to the master, " I can have noih- 
ing more to do with Mrs. Byron ; you must now manage her as you 
can." Finally, after two years of work, which she had done her 
best to mar, she herself requested his guardian to have her son re- 
moved to a public school, and accordingly he went to Harrow, where 



24 BYKOM 

he remained till the autumn of 1805. The first vacation in the 
summer of 1801, is marked by his visit to Cheltenham, where his 
mother, from whom he inherited a fair amount of Scotch supersti- 
tion, consulted a fortune-teller, who said he would be twice married 
the second time to a foreigner. ' 

Harrow was then under the management of Dr. Joseph Drury 
one of the most estimable of its distinguished head-masters. His 
account of the first impressions produced by his pupil, and his 
judicious manner of handling a sensitive nature, cannot with advan- 
tage be condensed. "Mr. Hanson," he writes, " Lord Byron's 
sohcitor, consigned him to my care at the age of thirteen and a 
half, with remarks that his education had been neglected; that he 
was ill prepared for a public school ; but that he thought there was 
2. cleverness about him. After his departure I took my youno- dis- 
ciple into my study, and endeavoured to bring him forward by 
inquiries as to his former amusements, employments, and associ- 
ates, but with little or no effect, and I soon found that a wild moun- 
tain colt had been submitted to my management. But there was 
mind in his eye. In the first place, it was necessary to attach him 
to an elder boy; but the information he received gave him no 
pleasure when he heard of the advances of some much youno-er 
than himself. This I discovered, and assured him that he should 
not be placed till by diligence he might rank with those of his own 
age. His manner and temper soon convinced me that he might 
be led by a silken string to a point, rather than a cable : on that 
principle I acted." 

After a time, Dr. Drury tells us that he waited on Lord Carlisle, 
who wished to give some information about his ward's property 
and to inquire respecting his abilities, and continues : " On the 
former circumstance I made no remark ; as to the latter I replied, 
' He has talents, my lord, which will add lustre to his rank.' ' In- 
deed ! ' said his lordship, with a degree of surprise that, according 
to my feeling, did not express in it all the satisfaction I expected." 
With, perhaps, unconscious humour on the part of the writer, we 
are left in doubt as to whether the indifference proceeded from' the 
jealousy that clings to poetasters, from incredulity, or a feeling that 
no talent could add lustre to rank. 

In 1804 Byron refers to the antipathy his mother had to his 
guardian. Later he expresses gratitude for some unknown service, 
in recognition of which the second edition of the Hours of Idletiess 
was dedicated " by his obliged ward and affectionate kinsman," to 
Lord Carlisle. The tribute being cfildly received, led to fresh 
estrangement, and when Byron, on his coming of age, wrote to 
remind the earl of the fact, in expectation of being introduced to 
the House of Peers, he had for answer a mere form'al statement of 
its rules. This rebuff affected him as Addison's praise of Tickell 
affected Pope, and the following lines were published in the March 
of the same year : — 

" Lords too are bards ! such things at times befall, 
And 'tis some praise in peers to write at all. 



BYRON. 25 

Vet did or taste or reason sway the times, 

Ah ! who would talce their titles with their rhym 

Roscommon ! Sheffield ! with your spirits fled, 

No future laurels deck a noble head ; 

No muse will cheer, with renovating smile, 

The paralytic puling of Carlisle." 

In prose he adds, " If, before I escaped from my teens, I said any- 
thing in favour of his lordship's paper-books it was in the way of 
dutiful dedication, and more from the advice of others than my own 
judgment ; and I seize the first opportunity of pronouncing my sin- 
cere recantation." As was frequently the case with him, he re- 
canted again. In a letter of 1814 he expressed to Rogers his 
regret for his sarcasms ; and in his reference to the death of the 
Hon. Frederick Howard, in the third canto of Childe Harold, he 
tried to make amends in the lines — 

" Yet one I would select from that proud throng. 
Partly because they blend me with his line, 
And partly that I did his sire some wrong." 

This is all of any interest we know regarding the fitful connection 
of the guardian and ward. 

Towards Dr. Drury the poet continued through life to cherish 
sentiments of gratitude, and always spoke of him with veneration. 
"He was," he says, "the best, the kindest (and yet strict too) 
friend I ever had ; and I look on him still as a father, whose warn- 
ings I have remembered but too well, though too late, when I have 
erred, and whose counsel I have but followed when I have done 
well or wisely." 

Great educational institutions must consult the greatest good of 
the greatest number of commonplace minds, by regulations against 
which genius is apt to kick ; and Byron, who was by nature and 
lack of discipline peculiarly ill-fitted to conform to routine, con- 
fesses that till the last year and a half he hated Harrow. He 
never took kindly to the studies of the place, and was at no time 
an accurate scholar. In the Bards atid Reviewers, and elsewhere, 
he evinces considerable familiarity with the leading authors of an- 
tiquity, but it is doubtful whether he was able to read any of the 
more difficult of them in the original. His translations are gener- 
ally commonplace, and from the marks on his books he must have 
often failed to trust his memory for the meanings of the most ordi- 
nary Greek words. To the well-known passage in Childe Harold 
on Soracte and the " Latian echoes " he appends a prose comment 
which preserves its interest as bearing on recent educational con- 
troversies : " I wish to express that we become tired of the task 
before we can comprehend the beauty ; that we learn by rote be- 
fore we get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the 
future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed, at an age 
when we can neither feel nor understand the power of composition, 
which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and 
Greek, to relish or to reason upon. ... In some parts of the con- 



26 BYRON. 

tinent young persons are taught from common authors, and do not 
read the best classics till their maturity." 

Comparatively slight stress was then laid on modern languages. 
Byron learnt to read French with fluency, as he certainly made 
himself familiar with the great works of the eighteenth century ; 
l)ut he spoke it with so little ease or accuracy that the fact was 
always a stumbling-block to his meeting Frenchmen abroad. Of 
German he had a mere smattering. Italian was the only language, 
besides his own, of which he was ever a master. But the extent 
and variety of his general reading was remarkable. His list of 
books, drawn up in 1807, includes more history and biography than 
most men of education read during a long life ; a fair load of philos- 
ophy; the poets eitjitasse; among orators, Demosthenes, Cicero, 
and Parliamentary debates from the Revolution to the year 1742; 
pretty copious divinity, including Blair, Tillotson, Hooker, with the 
characteristic addition — " all very tiresome. I abhor books of re- 
ligion, though I reverence and love my God without the blasphe- 
mous notions of sectaries." Lastly, under the head of " Miscel- 
lanies " we have Spectator, Rambler, World, &c., &c. ; among 
novels, the works of Cervantes, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, 
Mackenzie, Sterne, Rabelais, and Rousseau. He recommends 
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy as the best storehouse for 
second-hand quotations, as Sterne and others have found it, and 
tells us that the great part of the books named were perused before 
the age of fifteen. Making allowance for the fact that most of the 
poet's autobiographic sketches are emphatically " Dichtttng und 
Wahrheit,^'' we can believe that he was an omnivorous reader — "I 
read eating, read in bed, read when no one else reads" — and hav- 
ing a memory only less retentive than Macaulay's, acquired so 
much general information as to be suspected of picking it up from 
Reviews. He himself declares that he never read a Review till 
he was eighteen years old — when he himself wrote one, utterly 
worthless, on Wordsworth. 

At Harrow, Byron proved himself capable of violent fits of 
work, but of "few continuous drudgeries." He would turn out an 
unusual number of hexameters, and again lapse into as much idle- 
ness as the teachers would tolerate. His forte was in declama- 
tion : his attitude and delivery, and power of extemporising, sur- 
prised even critical listeners into unguarded praise. " My quali- 
ties," he says, '"were much more oratorical and martial than poeti- 
cal ; no one had the least notion that I should subside into poesy." 
Unpopular at first, he began to like school when he had fought his 
way to be a champion, and from his energy in sports more than 
from the impression produced by his talents had come to be recog- 
nised as a leader among his fellows. Unfortunately, towards the 
close of his course, in 1805, the headship of Harrow changed hands. 
Dr. Drurv retired, and was succeeded by Dr. Butler. This event 
BUggestea the lines beginning — 

" Where are those honours, Ida, once your own, 
When Probus ftU'd your magisterial throne ? " 



BYRON. 2*1 

The appointment was generally unpopular among the boys, whose 
sympathies were enlisted in favour of Henry Drury, the son of 
their former master, and Dr. Butler seems for a time to have had 
considerable difficulty in maintaining discipline. Byron, always 
"famous for rowing," was a ringleader of the rebellious party, and 
compared himself to Tyrtaeus. On one occasion he tore down the 
window-gratings in a room of the school-house, with the remark 
that they darkened the hall ; on another he is reported to have 
refused a dinner invitation from the master, with the impertinent 
remark that he would never think of asking him in return to dine 
at Newstead. On the other hand, he seems to have set limits to 
the mutiny, and prevented some of the boys from setting tiieir 
desks on iire by pointing to their fathers' names carved on them. 
Byron afterwards expressed regret for his rudeness ; but Butler re- 
mains in his verse as " Pomposus of narrow brain, yet of a nar- 
rower soul." 

Of the poet's free hours, during the last years of his residence, 
which he refers to as among the happiest of his life, many were 
spent in solitary musing by an elm-tree, near a tomb to which his 
name has been given — a spot commanding a far view of London, 
of Windsor "blossomed high in tufted trees," and of the green 
fields that stretch between, covered in spring with the white and 
red snow of apple blossom. The others were devoted to the soci- 
ety of his chosen comrades. Byron, if not one of the safest, was 
one of the warmest of friends, and he plucked the more eagerly 
at the choicest fruit of English public school and college hfe, from 
the feeling he so pathetically expresses, — 

"Is there no cause beyond the common claim, 
Endear'd to all in childhood's very name .■* 
Ah, sure some stronger impulse vibrates here, 
Which whispers Friendship will be doubly dear 
To one who thus for kindred hearts must roam, 
And seek abroad the love denied at home. 
Those hearts, dear Ida, have I found in thee — 
A home, a world, a paradise to me." 

Of his Harrow intimates, the most prominent were the Duke of 
Dorset, the poet's favoured fag ; Lord Clare (the Lycus of the 
Childish RecollectioTi.s)\ Lord Delawarr (the Euryalus); John Wing- 
field (Alonzo), who died at Coimbra, 1811 ; Cecil Tattersall (Davus); 
Edward Noel Long (Cleon) ; Wildman, afterwards proprietor of 
Newstead ; and Sir Robert Peel. Of the last, his form-fellow and 
most famous of his mates, the story is told of his being unmerci- 
fully beaten for offering resistance to his fag master, and Byron 
rushing up to intercede with an offer to take half the blows. Peel 
was an exact contemporary, having been born in the same year, 
1788. It has been remarked that most of the poet's associates 
were his juniors, and, less fairly, that he liked to regard them as 
his satellites. But even at Dulwich his ostentation of rank had 
provoked for him the nickname of "the old English baron." To 
Wildman, who, as a senior, had a right of inflicting chastisement 



S8 £ YROJV. 

for offences, he said, " I find you have got Delawarr on your Hat ; 
pray don't Hck him." " Why not ? " was the reply. " Why, I don't 
know, except that he is a brother peer." Again, he interfered 
with the more effectual arm of physical force to rescue a junior 
prot(''g(f — lame like himself, and otherwise much weaker — from the 
ill-treatment of some hulking tyrant. '' Harness,'' he said, " if any 
one bullies you, tell me, and I'll thrash him if I can ; " and he kept 
his word. Harness became an accomplished clergyman and minor 
poet, and has left some pleasing reminiscences of his former patron. 
The prodigy of the school, George Sinclair, was in the habit of 
writing the poet's exercises, and getting his battles fought for him 
in return. His bosom friend was Lord Clare. To him his confi- 
dences were most freely given, and his most affectionate verses 
addressed. In the characteristic stanzas entitled " L'amitie est 
I'amour sans ailes," we feel as if between them the qualifying 
phrase might have been omitted ; for their letters, carefully pre- 
served on either side, are a record of the jealous complaints and the 
reconciliations of lovers. In 1821 Byron writes, " I never hear the 
name Clare without a beating of the heart even now ; and I write 
it with -the feelings of 1803-4-5, ad infinit7t//t." At the same date 
he says of an accidental meeting : " It annihilated for a moment 
all the years between the present time and the days of Harrow. 
It was a new and inexplicable feeling, like a rising from the grave 
to me. Clare too was much agitated — more in appearance than I 
was myself — for I could feel his heart beat to his fingers' ends, 
unless, indeed, it was the pulse of my own which made me think 
so. We were but five minutes together on the pubhc road, but I 
hardly recollect an hour of my existence that could be weighed 
against them." They were " all that brothers should be but the 
name ; " and it is interesting to trace this relationship between the 
greatest genius of the new time and the son of the statesman who, 
in the preceding age, stands out serene and strong amid the swarm 
of turbulent rioters and ranting orators by whom he was surrounded 
and reviled. 

Before leaving Harrow the poet had passed through the expe- 
rience of a passion of another kind, with a result that unhappily 
coloured his life. Accounts differ as to his first meeting with Mary 
Ann Chaworth, the heiress of the family whose estates adjoined 
his own, and daughter of the race that had held with his such 
varied relations. In one of his letters he dates the introduction 
previous to his trip to Cheltenham, but it seems not to have ripened 
into intimacy till a later period. Byron, who had, in the autumn of 
1802, visited his mother at Bath, joined in a masquerade there, and 
attracted attention by the liveliness of his manners. In the follow- 
ing year Mrs. Byron again settled at Nottingham, and in the course 
of a second and longer visit to her he frequently passed the night 
at the Abbey, of which Lord Grey de Ruthven was then a tem- 
porary tenant. This was the occasion of his renewing his acquaint- 
ance with the Chaworths, who invited him to their seat at Annesley. 
He used at first to return every evening to Newstead, giving the 



BYRON. 29 

excuse that the family pictures would come down and take revenge 
on him for his grand-uncle's deed, a fancy repeated in the Siege of 
Corinth. Latterly he consented to stay at Annesley, which thus 
became his headquarters during the remainder of the holidays of 
1803 The rest of the six weeks were mainly consumed in an ex- 
cursion to Matlock and Castleton, in the same companionship. 
This short period, with the exception of prologue and epilogue, 
embraced the old story of his first real love. Byron was on this 
occasion in earnest ; he wished to marry Miss Chaworth, an event 
which, he says, would have " joined broad lands, healed an old 
feud, and satisfied at least one heart." 

The intensitv of his passion is suggestively brought before us in 
an account of hi's crossing the Styx of the Peak cavern, alone with 
the lady and the Charon of the boat. In the same passage he in- 
forms us that he had never told his love ; but that she had discov- 
ered—it is obvious that she never returned— it. We have another 
vivid picture of his irritation when she was waltzing in his presence 
at Matlock; then an account of their riding together in the country 
on their return to the family residence ; again, of his bending over 
the piano as she was playing the Welsh air of " Mary Anne ; " 
and, lastly, of his overhearing her heartless speech to her maid, 
which first opened his eyes to the real state of affairs—" Do you 
think I could care for that lame boy 1 " — upon which he rushed 
out of the house, and ran, like a hunted creature, to Newstead. 
Thence he shortly returned from the rougher school of hfe to his 
haunts and tasks at Harrow. A year later the pair again met to 
take farewell, on the hill of Annesley — an incident he has commem- 
orated in two short stanzas, that have the sound of a wind moan- 
ing over a moor. " I suppose," he said, " the next time I see you, 
you will be Mrs. Chaworth?" " I hope so," she replied (her be- 
trothed, Mr. Musters, had agreed to assume her family name). 
The announcement of her marriage, which took place in August, 
l8o5j was made to him by his mother, with the remark, " I have 
some news for you. Take out your handkerchief ; you will require 
it." On hearing what she had to say, with forced calm he turned 
the conversation to other subjects ; but he was long haunted by a 
loss which he has made the theme of many of his verses. In 1807 
he sent to the lady herself the lines beginning — 

" O had my fate been joined with thine." 

In the following year he accepted an invitation to dine at An- 
nesley, and was visibly affected by the sight of the infant daughter 
of Mrs. Chaworth, to whom he addressed a touching congratula- 
tion. Shortly afterwards, when about to leave England for the 
first time, he finally addressed her in the stanzas — 

" 'Tis done, and shivering in the gale, 
The bark unfurls her snowy sail." 

Some years later, having an opportunity of. revisiting the family of 



30 BYRON. 

his successful rival, Mrs. Leigh dissuaded him. " Don't go," she 
said, '• if you do you wiil certainly fall in love again, and there will 
be a scene." The romance of the story culminates in the famous 
Dream, a poem of unequal merit, but containing passages of real 
pathos, vi^ritten in the year i8i6 at Diodati, as we are told, amid a 
flood of tears. 

Miss Chaworth's attractions, beyond those of personal beauty, 
seem to have been mainly due — a common occurrence— to the 
poet's imagination. A young lady, two years his senior, of a lively 
and volatile temper, she enjoyed the stolen interviews at the gate 
between the grounds, and laughed at the ardent letters, passed 
through a confidant, of the still awkward youth whom she regarded 
as a boy. She had no intuition to divine the presence, or appreci- 
ate the worship, of one of the future master-minds of England, nor 
any ambition to ally herself with the wild race of Newstead, and 
preferred her hale, commonplace, fox-hunting squire. " She was 
the beau ideal," says Byron, in the first accurate prose account of the 
affair, written in 1823, a few days before his departure for Greece, 
" of all that my youthful fancy could paint of beautiful. And I 
have taken all my fables about the celestial nature of women from 
the perfection my imagination created in her. I say created ; for I 
found her, like the rest of the sex, anything but angelic." 

Mrs. Musters (her husband re-asserted his right to his own 
name) had in the long-run reason to regret her choice. The ill- 
assorted pair, after some unhappy years, resolved on separation ; 
and falling into bad health and worse spirits, the " bright morning 
star of Annesley " passed under a cloud of mental darkness. She 
died, in 1832, of fright caused by a Nottingham riot. On the de- 
cease of Musters, in 1850, every relic of her ancient family was 
sold by auction and scattered to the winds. 



BYRON. 



3» 



CHAPTER III. 

CAMBRIDGE, AND FIRST PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP. 

In October, 1805, on the advice of Dr. Drury, Byron was re- 
moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, and kept up a connexion with 
the University for less than three years of very irregular attendance, 
during which we hear nothing of his studies, except the contempt 
for them expressed in some of the least effective passages of his 
early satires. He came into residence in bad temper and low 
spirits. His attachment to Harrow characteristically redoubled as 
the time drew near to leave it, and his rest was broken " for the 
last quarter, with counting the hours that remained." He was 
about to start by himself, with the heavy feeling that he was no 
longer a boy, and yet against his choice, for he wished to go to 
Oxford. The Hours of Idletiess, the product of this period, are 
fairly named. He was so idle as regards " problems mathematic," 
and " barbarous Latin," that it is matter of surprise to learn that he 
was able to take his degree, as lie did, in March, 1808. 

A good German critic, dwelling on the comparatively narrow 
range of studies to which the energies of Cambridge were then 
mainly directed, adds, somewhat rashly, that English national lit- 
erature stands for the most part beyond the range of the academic 
circle. This statement is often reiterated with persistent inaccu- 
racy-; but the most casual reference to biography informs us that 
at least four-fifths of the leading statesmen, reformers, and philos- 
ophers of England have been nurtured within the walls of her 
universities, and cherished a portion of their spirit. From them 
have sprung the intellectual fires that have, at every crisis of our 
history, kindled the nation into a new life ; from the age of Wycliffe, 
through those of Latimer, Locke, Gibbon, Macaulay, to the present 
reign of Physicists, comparatively few of the motors of their age 
have been wholly " without the academic circle." Analysing with 
the same view the lives of the British poets of real note from Bar- 
bour to Tennyson, we find the proportion of University men in- 
creases. " Poeta nascitur et fit ; " and if the demands of technical 
routine have sometimes tended to stifle the comparative repose of 
a seclusion " unravaged " by the fierce activities around it, the 
habit of dwelling on the old wisdom and harping on the ancient 
strings, is calculated to foster the poetic temper and enrich its re- 
sources. The discouraging effect of a sometimes supercilious and 
conservative criticism is not an unmixed evil. The verse-writer 



32 BYRON. 

who can be snuffed out by the cavils of a tutorial drone is a 
poetaster silenced for his country's good. It is true, however, that 
to original minds, bubbling with spontaneity, or arrogant with the 
consciousness of power, the discipline is hard, and the restraint 
excessive ; and that the men whom their colleges are most proud 
to remember, have handled them severely. Bacon inveighs against 
the scholastic trifling of his day; Milton talks of the waste of 
time on litigious brawling ; Locke mocks at the logic of the schools : 
Cowley complains of being taught words, not things ; Gibbon re- 
joices over his escape from the port and prejudice of Magdalen ; 
Wordsworth contemns the " trade in classic niceties," and roves 
'• in magisterial liberty" by the Cam, as afterwards among the hills. 
But all those hostile critics owe much to the object of their 
animadversion. Any schoolboy can refer the preference of Light 
to Fruit in the Novum Organum, half of Cointis and Lycidas, the 
stately periods of the Decline and Fall, and the severe beauties of 
Laodamia, to the better influences of academic training on the 
minds of their authors. Similiarly, the richest pages of Byron's 
work — from the date of The Curse of Minerva to that of the 
"Isles of Greece" — are brightened by lights and adorned by al- 
lusions due to his training, imperfect as it was, on the slopes of 
Harrow, and the associations fostered during his truant years by 
the sluggish stream of his " Injusta noverca." At her, however, 
he continued to rail as late as the publication of Beppo, in the 75th 
and the 76th stanzas of which we find another cause of complaint — 

" One hates an author that's all author, fellows 
In foolscap uniforms turn'd up with ink — 
So very anxious, clever, fine, and jealous, 

One don't know what to say to them, or think." 

Then, after commending Scott, Rogers, and Moore for being mea 
of the world, he proceeds : — 

*' But for the children of the ' mighty mothers,' 
The would-be wits and can't-be gentlemen, 
I leave them to the daily * Tea is ready,' 
Snug coterie, and literary lady." 

This attack, which called forth a counter-invective of unusual 
ferocity from some unknown scribbler, is the expression of a senti- 
ment which, sound enough within limits, Byron pushed to an ex- 
treme. He had a rooted dislike of professional litterateurs, and 
was always haunted by a dread that they would claim equality 
with him on the common ground of authorship. He aspired 
through life to the superiority of a double distinction — that of a 
peer among poets, and a poet amcmg peers. In this same spirit he 
resented the comparison frequently made betwe*en him and Rous- 
seau, and insisted on points of contrast. " He had a bad memory 
' — I a good one. He was of the people — I of the aristocracy." 
Byron was capable of unbending where the difference of rank was SO 



BYR^DN. 33 

great that it could not be ignored. On this principle we may ex- 
plain his enthusiastic regard for the chorister Eddlestone, from 
whom he received the cornelian that is the theme of some of his 
verses, and whose untimely death in 1811 he sincerely mourned. 

Of his Harrow friends, Harness and Long in due course fol- 
lowed him to Cambridge, where their common pursuits were re- 
newed. With the latter — who was drowned in 1809, on a passage 
to Lisbon with his regiment — he spent a considerable portion of 
his time on the Cam, swimming and diving, in which art they Avere 
so expert as to pick up eggs, plates, thimbles, and coins from a 
depth of fourteen feet — incidents recalled to the poet's mind by 
reading Milton's invocation to Sabrina. During the same period 
he distinguished himself at cricket, as in boxing, riding, and shoot- 
ing. Of his skill as a rider there are various accounts. He was 
an undoubted marksman, and his habit of carrying about pistols, 
and use of them wherever he went, was often a source . of annoy- 
ance and alarm. He professed a theoretical objection to duelling, 
but was as ready to take a challenge as Scottj and more ready to 
send one. 

Regarding the masters and professors of Cambridge, Byron has 
little to say. His own tutor, Tavell, appears pleasantly enough in 
his verse, and he commends the head of his college, Dr. Lort 
Mansel, for dignified demeanour in his office and a past reputation 
for convivial wit„ His attentions to Professor Hailstone at Harrow- 
gate were graciously offered and received ; but in a letter to Mur- 
ray he gives a graphically abusive account of Porson, " hiccuping 
Greek like a Helot " in his cups. The poet was first introduced at 
Cambridge to a brilliant circle of contemporaries, whose talents or 
attainments soon made them more or less conspicuous, and most 
of whom are interesting on their own account as well as from their 
connexion with the subsequent phases of his career. By common 
consent Charles Skinner Matthews, son of the member for Here- 
fordshire, 1802-6, was the most remarkable of the group. Distin- 
guished alike for scholarship, physical and mental courage, subtlety 
of thought, humour of fancy, and fascinations of character, this 
young man seems to have made an impression on the undergradu- 
ates of his own, similar to that left by Charles Austin on those of 
a later generation. The loss of this "friend Byron always regarded 
as an incalculable calamity. In a note to Childe Harold \\^ writes: 
" I should have ventured on a verse to the memory of Matthews, 
were he not too much above all praise of mine. His powers of 
mind shown in the attainment of greater honours, against the ablest 
candidates, than those of any graduate on record at Cambridge, 
have sufficiently established his fame on the spot where it was ac- 
quired ; while his softer qualities live in the recollection of friends 
who loved him too well to envy his superiority." He was drowned 
while bathing alone among the reeds of the Cam, in the summer 
ofiSii. 

In a letter written from Ravenna in 1820, Byron, in answer \o 
a request for contributions to a proposed memoir, introduces iato 

3 



34 BYRON. 

his notes much autobiographical matter. In reference to a joint 
visit to Nevvstead he writes : " Matthews and myself had travelled 
down from London together, talking all the way incessantly upon 
one single topic. When we got to Loughborough, I know not what 
chasm had made us diverge for a moment to some other subject, at 
which he was indignant. ' Come,' said he, ' don't let us break 
through ; let us go on as we began, to our journey's end ; ' and so 
he continued, and was as entertaining as ever to the very end. He 
had previously occupied, during my year's absence from Cambridge, 
my rooms in Trinity, with the furniture; and Jones (the gyp),"in 
liis odd way, had said, in putting him in, ' Mr. Matthews, I rec- 
commend to your attention not to damage any of the movables, 
for Lord Byron, sir, is a young man of inviultnous passions.^ 
Matthews was delighted with this, and whenever anybody came to 
visit him, begged them to handle the very door with caution, and 
used to repeat Jones's admonition in his tone and manner. . . . He 
had the same droll sardonic way about everything. A wild Irish- 
man, named F., one evening beginning to say something at a large 
supper, Matthews roared, ' Silence ! ' and then, pointing to F., 
cried out, in the words of the oracle, ' Orson is endowed with 
reason.' When Sir Henry Smith was expelled from Cambridge 
for a row with a tradesman named ' Hiron,' Matthews solaced him- 
self with shouting under Hiron's windows every evening — 

' Ah me ! what perils do environ 
The man who meddles with hot Hiron 1 

He was also of that band of scoffers who used to rouse Lort 
Mansel from his slumbers in the lodge of Trinity ; and when he 
appeared at the window, foaming with wrath, and crying out, ' I 
know you, gentlemen — I know you ! ' were wont to reply, 'We 
beseech thee to hear us, good Lort. Good Lort, deliver us !' " 

The whole letter, written in the poet's mature and natural style, 
gives a vivid picture of the social life and surroundings of his Cam- 
bridge days : how much of the set and sententious moralising of 
some of his formal biographers might we not have spared, for a 
report of the conversation on the road from London to Newstead. 
Of the others gathered round the same centre, Scrope Davies en- 
listed the largest share of Byron's affections. To him he \vrote 
after the catastrophe : " Come to me, Scrope ; I am almost deso- 
late — left alone in the world. I had but you, and H., and M., and 
let me enjoy the survivors while I can." Later he says, " Matthews, 
Davies, Hobhouse, and myself formed a coterie of our own. 
Davies has always beaten us all in the war of words, and by col- 
loquial powers at once delighted and kept us in order ; even M. 
yielded to the dashing vivacity of S. D." The last is everywhere 
commended for the brilliancy of his wit and repartee : he was 
never afraid to speak the truth. Once when the poet, in one of 
his fits of petulance, exclaimed, intending to produce a terrible im- 
pression, " I shall go 7nad! " Davies calmly and cuttingly observed, 



BYRON. 35 

" It is much more like silliness than madness ! " He was the only 
man who ever laid Byron under any serious pecuniary obligation, 
having lent him 4800/. in some time of strait. This was repaid on 
March 27, 1814, when the pair sat up over champagne and claret 
from six till midnight, after which " Scrope could not be got into 
the carriage on the way home, but remained tipsy and pious on his 
knees." Davies was much disconcerted at the influence which the 
sceptical opinions of IVIatthews threatened to exercise over Byron's 
mind. The fourth of this quadrangle of amity was John Cam Hob- 
house, afterwards Lord Broughton, the steadfast friend of the 
poet's whole life, the companion of his travels, the witness of his 
rr>arriage, the executor of his wih, the zealous guardian and vindi- 
cator of his fame. His ability is abundantly attested by the im- 
pression he left on his contemporaries, his published description of 
the Pilgrimage, and subsequent literary and political career. Byron 
bears witness to the warmth of his affections and the charms of his 
conversation, and to the candour which, as he confessed to Lady 
Blessington, sometimes tried his patience. There is little doubt 
that they had some misunderstanding when travelling together, but 
it was a passing cloud. Eighteen months after his return the poet 
admits that Hobhouse was his best friend ; and when he unex- 
pectedly walked up the stairs of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, at Pisa, 
Madame Guiccioli informs us that Byron was seized with such 
violent emotion, and so extreme an excess of joy, that it seemed to 
take away his strength, and he was forced to sit down in tears. 

On the edge of this i.iner circle, and in many respects associated 
with it, was the Rev. Francis Hodgson, a ripe scholar, good trans- 
lator, a sound critic, a fluent writer of graceful verse, and a large- 
hearted divine, whose correspondence, recently edited with a con- 
necting narrative by his son, has thrown light on disputed passages 
of Lord Byron's hfe. The views entertained by the friends' on 
literary matters were almost identical; they both fought under the 
standards of the classic school ; they resented the same criticisms, 
they applauded the same successes, and were bound together by 
the strong tie of mutual admiration. Byron commends Hodgson's 
verses, and encourages him to write ; Hodgson recognises in the 
Bards and Reviewers and the early cantos of Childe Harold the 
promise of Manfred and Cain. Among the associates who strove 
to bring the poet back to the anchorage of fixed belief, and to wean 
him from the error of his thoughts, Francis Hodgson was the most 
charitable, and therefore the most judicious. That his cautions 
and exhortations were never stultified by pedantry or excessive 
dogmatism, is apparent from the frank and unguarded answers 
which they called forth. In several, which are preserved, and 
some for the first time reproduced in the recently-published Memoir, 
we are struck by the mixture of audacity and superficial dogmatism, 
sometimes amounting to effrontery, that is apt to characterise the 
negations of a youthful sceptic. I'n September, 181 1, Byron writes 
from Newstead : " I will have nothing to do with your immortality; 
we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of specih 



36 



BYRON. 



lating upon another. Christ came to save men, but a good Pagan 
will go to heaven, and a bad Nazarene to hell. I am no Platonist, 
I am nothing at all ; but I would .sooner be a Paulician, Manichean, 
Spinozist, Gentile, Pyrrhonian, Zoroastrian, than one of the seventy- 
two villainous sects who are tearing each other to pieces for the 
love of the Lord and hatred of each other. I will bring ten Mussul- 
men, shall shame you all in good-will towards men and prayer to 
God." On a similar outburst in verse, the Rev. F. Hodgson com- 
ments with a sweet humanity, " The poor dear soul meant nothing 
of this." Elsewhere the poet writes, " I have read Watson to 
Gibbon. He proves nothing; so I am where I was, verging to- 
wards Spinoza ; and yet is a gloomy creed ; and I want a better ; but 
there is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, 
I deny nothing, but dotibt everythingy But his early attitude on 
matters of religion is best set forth in a letter to Gifford, of 1813, 
in which he says, " I am no bigot to infidelity, and did not expect 
that, because 1 doubted the immortality of man, I should be charged 
with denying the existence of a God. It was the comparative in- 
significance of ourselves and our world, when j^laced in comparison 
of the mighty whole of which man is an atom, that first led me to 
imagine that our pretensions to eternity might be o\'errated. This, 
and being early disgusted with a Calvinistic Scotch school, where 
I was cudgelled to church for the first ten years of my life, afflicted 
me with this malady ; for, after all, it is, I believe, a disease of the 
mind, as much as other kinds of hypochondria." 

Hodgson was a type of friendly forbearance and loyal attach- 
ment, which had for their return a perfect open-heartedness in his 
correspondent. To no one did the poet more freely abuse himself; 
to no one did he indulge in more reckless sallies of humour ; to no 
one did he more readily betray his little conceits. From him Byron 
sought and received advice, and he owed to him the prevention of 
what might have been a most foolish and disastrous encounter. 
On the other hand, the clergyman was the recipient of one of the 
poet's many single-hearted acts of munificence — a gift of 1000/., to 
pay off debts to which he had been left heir. In a letter to his 
uncle, the former gratefully alludes to this generosity : " Oh, if you 
knew the exultation of heart, aye, and of head too, I feel at being 
free from those depressing embarrassments, you would, as I do, 
bless my dearest friend and brother, Byron." The whole transac- 
tion is a pleasing record of a benefit that was neither sooner nor 
later resented by the receiver. 

Among other associates of the same group should be mentioned 
Henry Drury — long Hodgson's intimate friend, and ultimately his 
brother-in-law, to whom many of Byron's first series of letters from 
abroad are addressed — and Robert Charles Dallas, a name sur- 
rounded with various associations, who played a not insignificant 
part in Byron's history, and after his death, helped to swell the 
throng of his annotators. This gentleman, a connexion by mar- 
riage, and author of some now forgotten novels, first made acquaint- 
ance with the poet in London early in 1808, when we have two 



BYRON. 



37 



letters from Byron, in answer to some compliment on his early 
volume, in which, though addressing his correspondent merely as 
" Sir," his flippancy and habit of boasting of excessive badness 
reach an absurd climax. 

Meanwhile, during the intervals of his attendance at college, 
Eyron had made other friends. His vacations were divided be- 
tween London and Southwell, a small town on the road from Mans- 
field and Newark, once a refuge of Charles I., and still adorned by 
an old Norman minster. Here Mrs. Byron for several summer 
seasons took up her abode, and was frequently joined by her son. 
He was introduced to John Pigot, a medical student of Edinburgh, 
and his sister Elizabeth, both endowed with talents above the 
average, and keenly interested in literary pursuits, to whom a num- 
ber of his letters are addressed ; also to the Rev. J. T. Becher, 
author of a treatise on the state of the poor, to whom he was in- 
debted for encouragement and counsel. The poet often rails at the 
place, which he found dull in comparison with Cambridge and Lon- 
don ; writing from the latter, in 1807: "O Southwell, how I re- 
joice to have left thee ! and how I curse the heavy hours I dragged 
along for so many months among the Mohawks who inhabit youi; 
kraals ! " and adding that his sole satisfaction during his residence 
there was having pared off some pounds of flesh. Notwithstand- 
ing, in the small but select society of this inland watering-place he 
passed, on the whole, a pleasant time — listening to the music of the 
simple ballads in which he delighted, taking part in the perform- 
ances of the local theatre, making excursions, and writing verses. 
This otherwise quiet time was disturbed by exhibitions of violence 
on the part of Mrs. Byron, which suggest the idea of insanity. 
After one more outrageous than usual, both mother and son are 
said to have gone to the neighbouring apothecary, each to request 
him not to supply the other with poison. On a later occasion, 
when he had been meeting her outbursts of rage with stubborn 
mockery, she flung a poker at his head, and narrowly missed her 
aim. Upon this he took flight to London, and his Hydra or Alecto, 
as he calls her, followed : on their meeting, a truce was patched, 
and they withdrew in opposite directions, she back to Southwell, 
he to refresh himself on the Sussex coast, till in the August of the 
same year (1806) he again rejoined her. Shortly aftemards we 
have from Pigot a description of a trip to Harrowgate, when his 
lordship's favourite Newfoundland, Boatswain, whose relation to 
his master recalls that of Bounce to Pope, or Maida to Scott, sat 
on the box. 

In November Byron printed for private circulation the first 
issue of his juvenile poems. Mr. Becher having called his attention 
to one which he thought objectionable, the impression was de- 
stroyed ; and the author set to work upon another, which, at once 
weeded and amplified, saw the light in January, 1807. He sent 
copies, under the title of Jitvetiilia, to several of his friends, and 
among others to Henry Mackenzie (the Man 0^ Feehng), and to 
Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee. Encouraged by their favour- 



38 BYRON. 

able notices, he determined to appeal to a wider audience, and in 
March, 1807, the Hours of Idleness, still proceeding from the local 
press at Newark, were given to the world. la June we find the 
poet again writing from his college rooms, dwelling with boyish 
detail on his growth in height and reduction in girth, his late hours 
and heavy potations, his comrades, and the prospects of his book. 
From July to September he dates from London, excited by the 
praises of. some now obscure magazine, and planning a journey to 
the Hebrides. In October he is again settled at Cambridge, and 
in a letter to Miss Pigot, makes a humorous reference to one of his 
fantastic freaks : " I have got a new friend, the finest in the world 
— a tame bear. When I brought him here, they asked me what I 
meant to do with him, and my reply was, ' He should sit for a 
fellowship.' This answer delighted them not." The greater part 
of the spring and summer of 1808 was spent at Dorant's Hotel, 
Albemarle Street. Left to himself, he seems during this period for 
the first time to have freely indulged in dissipations, which are in 
most lives more or less carefully concealed. But Byron, with 
almost unparalleled folly, was perpetually taking the public into his 
confidence, and all his " sins of blood," with the strange additions 
of an imaginative effrontery, have been thrust before us in a manner 
which even Theophile Gautier might have thought indelicate. 
Nature and circumstances conspired to the result. With passions 
which he is fond of comparing to tlie fires of Vesuvius and Hecla, 
he was, on his entrance into a social life which his rank helped to 
surround with temptations, unconscious of any sufiicient motive for 
resisting them ; he had no one to restrain him from the whim of 
the moment, or with sufiicient authority to give him effective 
advice. A temperament of general despondency, relieved by 
reckless outbursts of animal spirits, is the least favourable to habit- 
ual self-control. The melancholy of Byron was not of the pensive 
and innocent kind attributed to Cowley, rather that of the ,'J-^^a-' 
yyoXtxoioi whom Aristotle asserts, with profound psychological or 
physiological intuition, that they are as\ i-j (>(fo!ipq. opicsi. The 
absurdity of Mr. Moore's frequent declaration,' that' all great poets 
are inly wrapt in perpetual gloom, is only to be excused bv the 
modesty which, in the saying so, obviously excludes himself 'from 
the list. But it is true that anomalous energies are sources of in- 
cessant irritation to their possessor, until they have found their 
proper vent in the free exercise of his highest faculties. Byron 
had not yet done this, when he was rushing about between Lon- 
don, Brighton, Cambridge, and Newstead — shooting, gambling, 
swimming, alternately drinking deep and trying to starve himself 
into elegance, green-room hunting, travelling with disguised com- 
panions,* patronizing D'Egville the dancing-master, Grimaldi the 
clown, and taking lessons from Mr. Jackson^the distinguished pro- 

* In reference to one of these, see an interesting letter from Mr. Minto to the 
AthencEum in the year i3f6, in which, witli considerable though not conclusive ingenuity, 
he endeavours to identify the girl witii " Thyrza " and with " Astart^," whom he regards 
as the same person. 



BYRON. 



39 



fessor o£ pugilism, to whom he afterwards affectionately refers as 
his " old friend and corporeal pastor and master." There is no 
inducement to dwell on amours devoid of rop~ance, further than to 
remember that they never trenched on what the common code of 
the fashionable world terms dishonour. We may beheve the poet's 
later assertion, backed by want of evidence to the contrary, that he 
had never been the first means of leading any one astray — a fact 
perhaps worthy the attention of those moral worshippers of Goethe 
and Burns who hiss at Lord Byron's name. 

Though much of this year of his life was passed unprofitabl}', 
from it dates the impulse that provoked him to put forth his 
powers. 'Y\vQ Edinburgh, vi\\.\\ \X\^ attack on ihe Hours of Idle- 
ness, appeared in March, 1808. This production, by Lord Brougham, 
is a specimen of the tomahawk style of criticism prevalent in the 
early years of the century, in which the main motive of the critic 
was, not to deal fairly with his author, but to acquire for himself 
an easy reputation for cleverness, by a series of smart, con- 
temptuous sentences. Taken separately, the strictures of the 
Edinburgh are sufficiently just, and the passages quoted for censure 
are all bad. Byron's genius as a pOet was not remarkably pre- 
cocious. The Hours of Idleness seldom rise, either in thought or 
expression, very far above the average level of juvenile verse ; 
many of the pieces in the collection are weak imitations, or common- 
place descriptions ; others, suggested by circumstances of local or 
temporary interest, had served their turn before coming into print. 
Their prevailing sentiment is an affectation of misanthropy, con- 
veyed in such lines as these : — 

" Weary of love, of life, devour'd with spleen, 
I rest, a perfect Timon, not nineteen." 

This mawkish element unfortunately survives in much of the 
author's later verse. But even in this volume there are indications 
of force and command. The Prayer of Nature indeed, though 
previously written, was not included in the edition before the notice 
of the critic; but the sound of Loch-na-Gair and some of the 
stanzas on N'ew stead OM%\\i to have saved him from the mistakeof 
his impudent advice. The poet, who through life waited with 
feverish anxiety for every verdict on his work, is reported, after 
reading the review, to have looked like a man about to send a 
challenge. In the midst of a transparent show of indifference, he 
confess'es to have drunk three bottles of claret on the evening of 
its appearance. But the wound did not mortify into torpor; the 
Sea-King's blood stood him in good stead, and he was not long 
in collecting his strength for the panther-like spring, which, gaining 
strength by its delay, twelve months later made it impossible for 
him to be contemned. 

The last months of the year he spent at Newstead, vacated by 
the tenant, who had left the building in the tumble-down condition 
in which he found it. Byron was, by his own acknowledgment, at 



40 



BYRON. 



this time "heavily dipped," generosities having combined with 
selfish extravagances to the result ; he had no funds to subject the 
place to anything like a thorough repair, but he busied himself in 
arranging a few of the rooms for his own present and his mother's 
after use. About this date he writes to her, beginning in his usual 
style, "Dear Madam," saying he has as yet no rooms ready for 
her reception, but that on his departure she shall be tenant till his 
return. During this interval he was studying Pope, and carefullj' 
maturing his own satire. In November the dog Boatsv/ain died 
in a fit of madness. The event called forth the famous burst of 
misanthropic verse, ending with the couplet — 

" To mark a friend's remains these stones arise ; 
I never knew but otie, and here he lies ; " 

and the inscription on the monument that still remains in the gar- 
dens of Newstead — 

" Near this spot 
Are deposited the remains of one 
Who possessed Beauty without Vanity, 
Strength without Insolence, 
Courage without Ferocity, 
And all the virtues of Man without his Vices. 
This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery 
If inscribed over human ashes. 
Is but a just tribute to the Memory of 
Boatswain, a Dog, 
Who was born at Newfoundland, May, 1803, 
And died at Newstead Abbey, November 18, 1808." 

On January 22, 1809, his lordship's coming of age was cele- 
brated with festivities, curtailed of their proportions by his limited 
means. Early in the spring he paid a visit to London, bringing 
the proof of his satire to the publisher, Cawthorne. From St. 
James's Street he writes to Mrs. Byron, on the death of Lord 
Falkland, who had been killed in a duel, and expresses a sympathy 
for his fainily, left in destitute circumstances, whom he proceeded 
to relieve with a generosity only equalled by the delicacy of the 
manner in which it was shown. Referring to his own embarrass- 
ment, he proceeds in the expression of a resolve, often repeated, 
" Come what may, Newstead and I stand or fall together. I have 
now lived on the spot — I have fixed my heart on it ; and no pres- 
sure, present or future, shall induce me to barter the last vestige 
of our inheritance." He was building false hopes on the result of 
the suit for the Rochdale property, which being dragged from 
'court to court, involved him in heavy expenses, with no satisfac- 
tory result. He took his seat in the House of Lords on the 13th 
of March, and Mr. Dallas, who accompanied him to the bar of the 
House, has left an account of his somewhat unfortunate demeanour. 
"His countenance, paler than usual, showed that his mind was 



BYRON. 



41 



agitated, and that he was thinking of the nobleman to whom he had 
once looked for a hand and countenance in his introduction. 
There were very few ijersons in the House. Lord Eldon 
was going through some ordinary business. When Lord Byron 
had taken the oaths, the Chancellor quitted his seat, and 
went towards him with a smile, putting out his hand warmly to 
welcome him ; and, though I did not catch the words, I saw that 
he paid him some compliment. This was all thrown away upon 
Lord Bvron, who made a stiff bow, and put the tips of his fingers 
into the Chancellor's hand. The Chancellor did not press a wel- 
come so received, but resumed his seat ; while Lord Byron care- 
lessly seated himself for a few minutes on one of the empty 
benches to the left of the throne, usually occupied by the lords in 
Opposition. When, on his joining me, I expressed what I had 
felt, he said, * If I had shaken hands heartily, he would have set 
me down for one of his party ; but I will have nothing to do with 
them on either side. I have taken my seat, and now I will go 
abroad.'" v-- 

A few days later the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 
appeared before the pubhc. The first anonymous edition was ex- 
hausted in a month ; a second, to which the author gave his name, 
quickly followed. He was wont at a later date to disparage this 
production, and frequently recanted many of his verdicts in margi- 
nal notes. Several, indeed, seem to have been dictated by feelings 
so transitory, that in the course of the correction of proof blame 
was turned into praise, and praise into blame ; i.e., he wrote in 
MS. before he met the agreeable author — 

" I leave topography to coxcomb Gall ; " 

we have his second thought in the first edition, before he saw the 
Troad— 

" I leave topography to classic Gel! ; " 

and this third, half-way in censure, in the fifth— 

"I lenve topography to rapid Gell." 

Of such materials are literary judgments made ! 

The success of Byron's satire was due to tlie fact of its being 
the only good thing of its kind since Cliurchill-^for in the Baviad 
and McEviad only butterflies were broken upon the wheel — and to 
its being the first promise of a new power. The Bards a?td Re- 
viewers also enlisted sympathy, from its vigorous attack upon the 
critics who had hitherto assumed the prerogative of attack. Jeffrey 
and Brougham were seethed in their own milk; and outsiders, 
whose credentials were still being examined, as Moore and Camp- 
bell, came in for their share of vigorous vituperation. The Lakers 
fared worst of all. It was the beginning of' the author's life-long 
war, only once relaxed, with Southey. Wordsworth— though 



42 



B YRON. 



against this passage is written " unjust," a concession not much 
sooner made than withdrawn — is dubbed an idiot, who — 

" Both by precept and example shows 
That prose is verse, and verse is only prose ; " 

and Coleridge, a baby — 

" To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear." 

The lines ridiculing the encounter between Jeffery and Moore are 
a fair specimen of the accuracy with which the author had caught 
the ring of Pope's antithesis : — 

" The surly Tolbooth scarcely kept her place. 
The Tolbooth felt — for marble sometimes can, 
On such occasions, feel as much as man — 
The Tolbooth felt defrauded of her charms. 
If Jeffrey died, except within her arms." 

Meanwhile Byron had again retired to Newstead, where he in- 
vited some choice spirits to hold a few weeks of farewell revel. 
Matthews, one of these, gives an account of the place, and the 
time they spent there — entering the mansion between a bear and a 
wolf, amid a salvo of pistol-shots ; sitting up to all hours, talking 
politics, philosophy, poetry; hearing stories of the dead lords, and 
the ghost of the Black B'rother; drinking their wine out of the 
skull-cup which the owner had made out of the cranium of some 
old monk dug up in the garden ; breakfasting at two, then reading, 
fencing, riding, cricketing, sailing on the lake, and playing with the 
bear or teasing the wolf. The party broke up without having made 
themselves responsible for any of the orgies of which Childe 
Harold raves, and which Dallas in good earnest accepts as vera- 
cious, when the poet and his friend Hobhouse started for Fal- 
mouth, on their way '■'■outre iner.'^ 



BYRON. 43 



CHAPTER IV. 

TWO YEARS OF TRAVEL. 

There is no romance of Munchausen or Dumas more marvel 
lous than the adventures attributed to Lord Byron abroad. ,\t 
tached to his first expedition are a series of narratives, by profess 
ing eye-witnesses, of his intrigues, encounters, acts of diablerie and 
of munificence, in particular of his roaming about the isles of 
Greece and taking possession of one of them, which have all the 
same relation to reality as the Arabian Nights to the actual reign 
of Haroun Al Raschid.* 

Byron had far more than an average share of the /w/^?^ spirit, 
the counterpoise in the English race of their otherwise arrogant 
isolation. He held with Wilhelm Meister — 

" To give space for wandering is it, 
That the earth was made so wide ; " 

and wrote to his mother from Athens : " I am so convmced of the 
advantages of looking at mankind, instead of reading about them, 
and the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow pre- 
judices of an islander, that I think there should be a lew amongst 
us to send our young men abroad for a term, among the few allies 
our wars have left us." 

On June nth, having borrowed money at heavy interest, and 
stored his mind with information about Persia and India, the con- 
templated but unattained goal of his travels, he left London ac- 
companied by his friend Hobhouse, Fletcher his valet, Joe Murray 
his old butler, and Robert Rushton, the son of one of his tenants, 
supposed to be represented by the Page in Childe Harold. The 
two latter, the one on account of his age, the other from his health 
breaking down, he sent back to England from Gibraltar. 

Becalmed for some days at Falmouth, a town which he de- 
scribes as "full of Quakers and salt fish," he despatched letters to 

* Those who wish to read them are referred to the large tliree volumes — published in 
»8a5, 1^ Mr. Iley, Porttnan Square — of anonymous authorship. 



44 BYRON. 

his mother, Drury, and Hodgson, exhibiting the changing moods 
of his mind. Smarting under a slight he had received at parting 
from a school-companion, who had excused himself from a farewell 
meeting on the plea that he liad to go shopping, he at one moment 
talks of his desolation, and says that, " leaving England without 
regret," he had thought of entering the Turkish service ; in the 
next, especially in the stanzas to Hodgson, he runs off into a strain 
of boisterous buffoonery. On the 2nd of July, the packet by which 
he was bound sailed for Lisbon, and arrived there about the mid- 
dle of the month, when the English fleet was anchored in the 
Tagus. The poet in some of his stanzas has described the fine 
view of the port and the disconsolate dirtiness of the city itself, the 
streets of which were at that time rendered dangerous by the fre- 
quency of religious and political assassinations. Nothing else re- 
mains of his sojourn to interest us, save the statement of Mr. Hob- 
house, that his friend made a more perilous, though less celebrated, 
achievement by water than his crossing the Hellespont, in swim- 
iritig from old Lisbon to Belem Castle. Byron praises the neigh- 
bouring Cintra as " the most beautiful village in the world," though 
he joins with Wordsworth in heaping anathemas on the Conven- 
tion, and extols the grandeur of Mafra, the Escurial of Portugal, in 
the convent of which a monk, showing the traveller a large lil^rary, 
asked if the English had any books in their country. Despatching 
his baggage and servants by sea to Gibraltar, he and his friend 
started on horseback through the south-west of Spain. Their first 
resting-place, after a ride of 400 miles, performed at an average rate 
of seventy in the twenty-four hours, was Seville, where they lodged 
for tliree days in the house of two ladies, to whose attractions, as 
well as the fascination he seems to have exerted over them, the 
poet somewhat garrulously refers. Here, too, he saw, parading on 
the Prado, the famous Maid of Saragassa, whom he celebrates in 
his equally famous stanzas (Childe Harold, I., 54-58). Of Cadiz, 
the next stage, he writes with enthusiasm as a modern Cythera, 
describing the bull-fights in his verse, and the beauties in glowing 
prose. The belles of this city, he says, are the Lancashire witches 
of Spain ; and by reason of them, rather than the sea-shore or the 
Sierra Morena, "sweet Cadiz is the first spot in the creation." 
Hence, by an English frigate, they sailed to Gibraltar, for which 
place he has nothing but curses. Bj'ron had no sympathy with the 
ordinary forms of British patriotism, and in our great struggle with 
the tyranny of the First Empire, he may almost be said to have 
sympathised with Napoleon. 

The ship stopped at Cagliari, in Sardinia, and again at Girgenti, 
on the Sicilian coast. Arriving at Malta, they halted there for three 
weeks — time enough to establish a sentimental, though Platonic, 
flirtation with Mrs. Spencer Smith, v/ife of our minister at Constan- 
tinople, sister-in-law of the famous admiral, and the heroine of some 
exciting adventures. She is the " Florence " of Childe Harold, 
and is afterwards addressed in some of the most graceful verses of 
his cavalier minstrelsy — 



byron: 42 



" Do thou, amidst the fair white walls, 

If Cadiz yet be free, 
At times from out her latticed halls 

Look o'er the dark blue sea — 
Then think upon Calypso's isles, 

Endear'd by days gone by — 
To others give a thousand smiles, 

To me a single sisjh." 



'o' 



The only other adventure of the visit is Byron's quarrel with an 
officer, on some unrecorded ground, which Hobhouse tells us 
nearly resulted in a duel. The friends left Malta on September 
29th, in the war-ship " Spider," and after anchoring off Patras, and 
spending a few hours on shore, they skirted the coast of Acar- 
nania, in view of localities— as Ithaca, the Leucadian rock, and 
Actium — whose classic memories filtered through the poet's mind 
and found a place in his masterpieces. Landing at Previsa, they 
started on a tour through Albania — 



•'to' 



" O'er many a mount sublime, 
" Through lands scarce noticed in historic tales." 

Byron was deeply impressed by the beauty of the scenery, and the 
half-savage independence of the people, described as " always 
strutting about with slow dignity, though in rags." In October we 
find him with his companions at Janina, hospitably entertained by 
order of Ali Pasha, the famous Albanian Turk, bandit, and despot, 
then engaged in besieging Ibrahim in Illyria. They proceeded on 
their way by "bleak Pindus," Acherusia's lake, and Zitza, with its 
monastery door battered by robbers. Before reaching the latter 
place they encountered a terrific thunder-storm, in the midst of 
which they separated, and Byron's detachment lost its way for nine 
hours, during which he composed the verses to Florence, quoted 
above. 

Some days later they together arrived at Tepelleni, and were 
there received by Ali Pasha in person. The scene on entering the 
town is described as recalling Scott's Branksome Castle and the 
feudal system; and the introduction to Ali, who sat for some of 
the traits of the poet's corsairs, is graphically reproduced in a letter 
tn Mrs. Byrop. " His first question was, why at so early an age I 
left my country, and without a Mala,' or nurse ? He then said'the 
English minister had told him I was of a great family, and desired 
his respects to my mother, which I now present to you (date, 
November 12th). He said he was certain I was a man of birth, 
because I had small ears, curling hair, and little white hands. He 
told me to consider him as a father whilst I was in Turke}', and 
said he looked on me as his son. Indeed he treated me like a 
child, sending rne almonds, fruit, and sweetmeats twenty times a 
day." Byron shortly afterwards discovered his host to fee a pois- 
oner and an assassin. '"Two days ago," he proceeds, in a passage 
w!«ch illustrates his character and a common experience, " I was 



46 



BYRON. 



nearly lost in a Turkish ship-of-war, owing to the ignorance of the 
captain and crew. Fletcher yelled after his wife ; the Greeks 
called on all the saints, the Mussulmen on Alia; the captain burst 
into tears and ran below deck, telling us to call on God. The sails 
were spht, the mainyard shivered, tlie wind blowing fresh, the night 
setting in ; and all our chance was to make for Corfu — or, as F. 
pathetically called it, ' a watery grave.' I did what I could to con- 
sole him, but finding him incorrigible, wrapped myself in my Al- 
banian capote, and lay down on the deck to wait the worst." Un- 
able from his lameness, says Hobhouse, to be of any assistance, he 
in a short time was found amid the trembling sailors fast asleep. 
They got back to the coast of Suli, and shortly afterwards started 
through Acarnania and .(Etolia for the Morea, again rejoicing in the 
wild scenery and the apparently kindred spirits of the wild men 
among whom they passed. Byron was especially fascinated by 
the fire-light dance and song of the robber band, which he de- 
scribes and reproduces in Childe Harold. On the 21st of Nov- 
ember he reached Mesolonghi, where, fifteen years later, he died. 
Here he dismissed most of his escort, proceeded to Patras, and on 
to Vostizza, caught sight of Parnassus, and accepted a flight of 
eagles near Delphi as a favouring sign of Apollo. " The last 
bird/' he writes, " I ever fired at -was an eaglet on the shore of the 
Gulf of Lepanto. It was only wounded, and I tried to save it — 
the eye was so bright. But it pined and died in a few days ; and 
I never did since, and never will, attempt the life of another bird." 
From Livadia the travellers proceeded to Thebes, visited the cave 
of Trophonius, Diana's fountain, the so-called ruins of Pindar's 
house, and the field of Cheronea, crossed Cithasron, and on Christ- 
mas, 1S09, arrived before the defile, near the ruins of Phyle, where 
he had his first glimpse of Athens, which evoked the famous 
lines : — 

"Ancient of days, august Athena! where, 
Where are thy men of might ? thy grand in soul? 
Gone, glimmering through the dreams of things that were. 
First in the race that led to glory's goal. 
They won, and pass'd away : is this the whole — 
A schoolboy's tale, the wonder of an hour 1 " 

After which he reverts to his perpetually recurring moral, "Men 
come and go ; but the hills, and waves, and skies, and stars en- 
dure " — 

" Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds ; 
Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare ; 
Art, glory, freedom fail — but nature still is fair." 

The duration of Lord Byron's first visit to Athens was about 
three months, and it was varied by excursions to different parts ol 
Attica — Eleusis, Hymettus, Cape Colonna, Sunium, the scene of 
Falconer's shipwreck, the Colonos of CEdipus, and Marathon, the 
plain of which is said to have been placed at his disposal for about 



BYRON. 47 

the same sum that thirty years later an American volunteered to 
give for the bark with his name on the tree at Newstead. Byron 
had a poor opinion of the modern Athenians, who seem to have at 
this period done their best to justify the Roman satirist. He 
found them superficial, cunning, and' false; but, with generous 
historic insight, he says that no nation in like circumstances would 
have been much better ; tliat they had the vices of ages of slavery, 
from which it would require ages of freedom to emancipate them. 

In the Greek capital he lodged at the house of a respectable 
lady, widow of an Englisli vice-consul, who had three daughters, 
the eldest of whom, Theresa, acquired an innocent and enviable 
fame as the Maid of Athens, without the dangerous glory of having 
taken any very firm iiold of the heart that she was asked to return. 
A more solid passion was the poet's genuine indignation on the 
"lifting," in Border phrase, of the marbles from the Parthenon, 
and their being taken to England by order of Lord Elgin. Byron 
never wrote anything more sincere than the Ciwse of Minerva; 
and he has recorded few incidents more pathetic than that of the 
old Greek who, when the last stone was removed for exportation, 
shed tears and said " riXoq \ " The question is still an open o-je of 
ethics. There are few Englishmen of the higher rank who do not 
hold London in the right hand as barely balanced by the rest of 
the world in the left ; a judgment in which we can hardly expect 
Romans, Parisians, and Athenians to concur. On the other hand, 
the marbles were mouldering at Athens, and they are preserved, 
like ginger, in the British Museum. 

Among the adventures of this period are an expedition across 
the Ilissus to some caves near Kharyati, in whicli the travellers 
were by accident nearly entombed ; another to Pentelicus, where 
they tried to carve their names on the marble rock ;, and a third to 
the environs of the Piraeus in the evening light. Early in March 
the convenient departure of an English sloop-of-war induced them 
to make an excursion to Smyrna. There, on the 28th of March, 
the second canto of Childe Harold, begun in the previous autumn 
at Janina, was completed. They remained in the neighbourhood, 
visiting Ephesus, without poetical result further than a reference 
to the jackals, in the Siege of Corinth; and on April nth left by 
the " Salsette," a frigate on its way to Constantinople. The vessel 
touched at the Troad, and Byron spent some time on land, snipe- 
shooting, and rambling among the reputed ruins of Ilium. The 
poet characteristically, in Don yuan and elsewhere, attacks the 
sceptics, and then half ridicules the belief. 

" I've stood upon Achilles' tomb, 
And heard Troy doubted ! Time will doubt of Rome 

****** 

There, on the green and village-cotted hill, is, 
Flank'd by the Hellespont, and by the sea, 
Entomb'd the bravest of the brave Achilles. — 
They say so : Bryant says the contrary." 



^8 BYRON. 

Being again detained in the Dardanelles, waiting for a fair wind, 
Byron landed on the European side, and swam, in company with 
Lieutenant Ekenhead, from Sestos to Abydos— a performance of 
which he boasts some twenty times. The strength of the current 
is the main difficulty of a feat, since so surpassed as to have passed 
from notice ; but it was a tempting theme for classical allusions. 
At length, on J\lay 14, he reached Constantinople, exalted the 
Golden Horn above all the sights he had seen, and now first aban- 
doned his design of travelling to Persia. Gait, and other more or 
less gossipping travellers, have accumulated a number of incidents 
of the poet's life at this period, of his fanciful dress, blazing in 
scarlet and gold, and of his sometimes absurd contentions for the 
privileges of rank— as when he demanded precedence of the Eng- 
lish ambassador in an interview with the Sultan, and, on its re- 
fusal, could only be pacified by the assurances of the Austrian in- 
ternuncio. In converse with indifferent persons he displayed a 
curious alternation of frankness and hauteur, and indulged a habit 
of letting people up and down, by which he frequently gave offence. 
More interesting are narratives of the suggestion of some of his 
verses, as the slave-market in Don Jua7t, and the spectacle of the 
dead criminal tossed on the waves, revived in the Bride of Abydos. 
One example is, if we except Dante's Ugolino^ the most remark- 
able instance in literature of the expansion, without the weakening, 
of the horrible. Take first Mr. Hobhouse's plain prose: "The 
sensations produced by the state of the weather" — it was wretched 
and stormy when they left the '• Salsette " for the city — " and leav- 
ing a comfortable cabin, were in unison with the impressions which 
we felt when, passing under the palace of the Sultans, and gazing 
at the gloomy cypress which rises above the walls, we saw two 
dogs gnawing a dead body." After this we may measure the 
almost fiendish force of a morbid imagination brooding over the 
incident — 

" And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall 
Hold o'er the dead their carnival : 
Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb, 
They were too busy to bark at him. 
From a Tartar's sk'nll they had stripped the flesh, 
As ve peel the fig when its fruit is fresh ; 
And their white tusks crunched on the whiter skull 
As it slipp'd through their jaws when their edge grew dull." 

No one ever more persistently converted the incidents of travel 
into poetic material; but sometimes, in doing so, he borrowed, 
more largely from his imagination than his memory, as in the de- 
scription of the seraglio, of which there is reason to doubt his 
having seen more than the entrance. 

Byron and Hobhouse set sail from Constantinople on the 14th 
July, 1810 — the latter to return direct to England, a determination 
which, from no apparent fault on either side, the former did not 
regret. One incident of the passage derives interest from its pos- 



BYRON. 45 

sible consequence. Taking up, and unsheathing, a yataghan which 
he found on the quarter-deck, he remarked, " I should Hke to know 
how a person feels after committing a murder." This harmless 
piece of melodrama — the idea of which is expanded in Mr. Do- 
bell's Balder, and parodied in Ftrmilian — may have been the basis 
of a report afterwards circulated, and accepted among others by 
Goethe, that his lordship had committed a. murder; hence, obvi- 
ously, the character of Lara, and the mystery of Manfred ! The 
poet parted from his friend at Zea (Ceos) : after spending some 
time in solitude on the little island, he returned to Athens, and 
there renewed acquaintance with his school friend, the Marquis of 
Sligo, who after a few days accompanied him to Corinth. They 
then separated, and Byron went on to Patras, in the Morea, where 
he had business with the Consul. He dates from there at the close 
of July. It is impossible to give a consecutive account of his life 
during the next ten months, a period consequently filled up with 
the contradictory and absurd mass of legends before referred to. 
A few facts only of any interest are extricable. During at least 
half of the time his head-quarters were at Athens, where he again 
met his friend the Marquis, associated with the English Consul 
and Lady Hester Stanhope, studied Romaic in a Franciscan mon- 
astery — where he saw and conversed with a motley crew of French, 
Italians, Danes, Greeks, Turks, and Americans — wrote to his 
mother and others, saying he had swum from Sestos to Abydos, 
was sick of Fletcher bawling for beef and beer, had done with au- 
thorship, and hoped, on his return, to lead a quiet recluse life. He 
nevertheless made notes to Harold, composed the Hitits from 
Horace and the Curse of Minerva, and presumably brooded over, 
and outlined in his mind, many of his verse romances. We hear 
no more of the Maid of Athens j but there is no fair ground to 
doubt that the Giaour was suggested by his rescue of a young wo- 
man whom, for the fault of an amour with some Frank, a party of 
Janissaries were about to throw, sewn up in a sack, into the sea. 
Mr. Gait gives no authority for his statement, that the girl's de- 
liverer was the original cause of her sentence. We may rest as- 
sured that if it had been so, Byron himself would have told us 
of il. 

A note to the Siege of Corinth is suggestive of his unequalled 
restlessness. " I visited all three — Tripolitza, Napoli, and Argos 
— in 1810-11 ; and in the course of journeying through the coun- 
try, from my first arrival in 1809, crossed the Isthmus eight times 
on my way from Attica to the Morea. In the latter locality we 
find him, during the autumn, the honoured guest of the Vizier 
Valhi (a son of AH Pasha), who presented him with a fine horse. 
During a second visit to Patras, in September, he was attacked by 
the same sort of marsh fever from v;hich, fourteen years after- 
wards, in the near neighbourhood, he died. On his recovery, in 
October, he complains of having been nearly killed by the heroic 
measures of the native doctors : " One of them trusts to his genius, 
never having studied ; the other, to a campaign of eighteen months 

4 



go BYRON. 

against the sick of Otranto, which he made in his youth with great 
effect. When I was seized with my disorder, I protested against 
both these assassins, but in vain." He was saved by the zeal of 
his servants, who asseverated that if his lordship died they would 
take good care the doctors should also ; on which the learned men 
discontinued their visits, and the patient revived. On his final re- 
turn to Athens, the restoration of his health was retarded by one 
of his long courses of reducing diet ; he lived mainly on rice, and 
vinegar and water. From that city he writes in the early spring, 
intimating his intention of proceeding to Egypt; but Mr. Hanson, 
his man of business, ceasing to send him remittances, the scheme 
was abandoned. Beset by letters about his debts, he again de- 
clares his determination to hold fast by Newstead, adding that if 
the place, which is his only tie to England, is sold, he won't come 
back at alL Life on the shores of the Archipelago is far cheaper 
and happier, and " Ubi bene ibi patria," for such a citizen of the 
world as he has become. Later he went to Malta, and was de- 
tained there by another bad attack of tertian fever. The next 
record of consequence is from the " Volage " frigate, at sea, June 
29, 181 1, when he writes in a despondent strain to Hodgson, that 
he is returning home " without a hope, and almost without a de- 
sire," to wrangle with creditors and lawyers about executions and 
coal-pits. " In short, I am sick and sorry ; and when I have a 
little repaired my irreparable affairs, away I shall march, either to 
campaign in Spain, or back again to the East, where I can at least 
have cloudless skies and a cessation from impertinence. I am 
sick of fops, and poesy, and prate, and shall leave the whole Cas- 
talian state to Bufo. or anybody else. Howbeit, I have written 
some 4000 lines, of one kind or another, on my travels." With 
these, and a collection of marbles, and skulls, and hemlock, and 
tortoises, and servants, he reached London about the middle ot 
July, and remained there, making some arrangements about busi- 
ness and publication. On the 23rd we have a short but kind letter 
to his mother, promising to pay her a visit on his way to Rochdale. 
" You know you are a vixen, but keep some champagne for me," 
he had written from abroad. On receipt of the letter she remarked, 
" If I should be dead before he comes down, what a strange thing 
it would be." Towards the close of the month she had an attack 
so alarming that he was summoned ; but before he had time to 
arrive she had expired, on the istof August, in a fit of rage brought 
on by reading an upholsterer's bill. On the way Byron heard the 
intelligence, and wrote to Dr. Pigot : " I now feel the truth of 
Mrs. Gray's observation, that we can only have one mother. Peace 
be with her 1 '= On arriving at Newstead, all their storms forgot- 
ten, the son was so affected that he did not trust himself to go to 
the funeral, but stood dreamily gazing at the cortege from the gate 
of the Abbey. Five days later, Charles S. Matthews was drowned. 



BYRON. 



%\ 



CHAPTER V 

SECOND PERIOD OF AUTHORSHIP. — LIFE IN LONDON. — CORRE- 
SPONDENCE WITH SCOTT. 

The deaths of Long, Wingfield, Eddlestone, Matthews, and of 
his mother had narrowed the circle of the poet's early compan- 
ions ; and, though he talks of each loss in succession as if it had 
been that of an only friend, we can credit a degree of loneliness, 
and excuse a certain amount of bitterness in the feelings with 
which he returned to London. He had at this time seen very lit- 
tle of the only relative whom he ever deeply loved. He and his 
half-sister met casually in 1804, and again in the following year. 
After her marriage (1807), Byron writes from abroad (1810), regret- 
ting having distressed her by his quarrel with Lord Carlisle. In 
l8[i she is mentioned as reversionary heiress of his estate. 
Towards the close of 1813, there are two allusions which testify to 
their mutual affection. Next we come to the interesting series of 
letters of 181 5-16, published with the Memoir of Mr. Hodgson, to 
whom, along with Hobhouse and Scrope Davies, his lordship, in a 
will and codicil, leaves the management of his property. ( Harness 
appears frequently at this period among his surviving intimates : 
to this list there was shortly added another. In speaking of his 
Bards and Reviewers^ X\\^ author makes occasional reference to 
the possibility of his being called to account for some of his at- 
tacks. His expectation was realised by a letter from the poet 
Moore, dated Dublin, January i, 1810, couched in peremptory 
terms, demanding to know if his lordship avowed the authorship 
of the insults contained in the poem. This letter, being entrusted 
to Mr. Hodgson, was not forwarded to Byron abroad ; but shortly 
after his return, he received another in more conciliatory terms, 
renewing the complaint. To this he replied, in a stiff but manly 
letter, that he had never meant to insult Mr. Moore ; but that he 
was, if necessary, ready to give him satisfaction. Moore accepting 
the explanation, somewhat querulously complained of his advances 
to friendship not being received. Byron again replied that, much 
as he would feel honoured by Mr. Moore's acquaintance, he being 
practically threatened by the irate Irishman, could hardly make 
the first advances. This called forth a sort of apology; the cor- 
respondents met at the house of Mr. Rogers, and out of the some' 



C2 BYRON. 



it 



what awkward circumstances, owing to the frankness of the " no- 
bler author," as the other ever after delights to call him, arose the 
life-long intimacy which had such various and lasting results. 
Moore has been called a false friend to Byron, and a traitor to his 
memory. The judgment is somewhat harsh, but the association 
between them was unfortunate. Thomas Moore had some sterhng 
qualities. His best satirical pieces are inspired by a real indigna-» 
tion, and lit up by a genuine humour. He was also an exquisite 
musician in words, and must have been occasionally a fascinating 
companion. But he was essentially a worldling, and, as such, a 
superficial critic. He encouraged the shallow affectations of his 
great friend's weaker work, and recoiled in alarm before the daring 
deiiance of his stronger. His criticisms on all Byron wrote and 
felt seriously on religion are almost, worthy of a conventicle. His 
letters to others on Ma7ifred, and Cain^ and Don Juan are the 
expression of sentiments which he had never the courage to state 
explicitly to the author. On the other hand, Byron was attracted 
beyond reasonable measure by his gracefully deferential manners, 
paid too much regard to his opinions, and overestimated his genius. 
For the subsequent destruction of the memoirs, urged by Mr. Hob- 
house and Mrs. Leigh, he was not wholly responsible ; though a 
braver man, having accepted the position of his lordship's literary 
legatee, with the express understanding that he would see to the 
fulfilment of the wishes of his dead friend, would have to the ut- 
most resisted their total frustration. 

Meanwhile, on landing in England, the poet had placed in the 
hands of Mr. Dallas the Hints from Horace^ which he intended to 
have brought out by the pubhsher Cawthorne. Of this perform- 
ance — an inferior edition, relieved by a few strong touches of the 
Ba>ds and Reviewers — Dallas ventured to express his disapproval. 
" Have you no other result of your travels ? " he asked ; and got 
for answer, " A few short pieces, and a lot of Spenserian stanzas ; 
not worth troubling you with, but you are welcome to them." 
Dallas took the remark literally, saw they were a safe success, and 
assumed to himself the merit of the discovery, the risks, and the 
profits. It is the converse of the story of Gabriel Harvey and the 
Faery Queefie. The first two cantos of Childe Harold bear no 
comparison with the legend of U>ia and the Red Cross K7iightj 
but there was no mistake about their proof of power, their novelty, 
and adaptation to a public taste as yet unjaded by eloquent and 
imaginative descriptions of foreign scenery, manners, and cli- 
mates. 

The poem — after being submitted to Gifford, in defiance of the 
protestations of the author, who feared that the reference might 
seem to seek the favour of the august Quarterly — was accepted by 
Mr. Murray, and proceeded through the press, subject to change 
and additions, during the next five months. The Hints from 
Horace, fortunately postponed and then suspended, appeared pos« 
thumously in 1831. Byron remained at Newstead till the close of 
October, negotiating with creditors and lawyers, and engaged in a 



BYRON. 



^Z 



correspondence about his publications, in the course of which he 
deprecates any identification of himself and his hero, though he 
had at first called him Childe Byron. " Instruct Mr. Murray," he 
entreats, "not to call the work 'Child of Harrow's Pilgrimage,' as 
he has done to some of my astonished friends, who wrote to in- 
quire after my sanity^ as well they might." At the end of the 
month we find him in London, again indulging in a voyage in " the 
ship of fools," in which Moore claims to have accompanied him; 
but at the same time exhibiting remarkable shrewdness in reference 
to the affairs of his household. In February, 1812, he again de- 
clares to Hodgson his resolve to leave England for ever, and fix 
himself in "one of the fairest islands of the East." On the 27th 
he made in the House of Lords his speech on a Bill to introduce 
special penalties against the frame-breakers of Nottingham. This 
effort, on which he received many compliments, led among other 
results to a friendly correspondence with Lord Holland. On April 
21 of the same year he again addressed the House on behalf of 
Roman Catholic Emancipation ; and in June, 1813, in favour of 
Major Cartwright's petition. On all these occasions, as afterwards 
on the continent, Byron espoused the Liberal side of politics. 
But his role was that of Manlius or Caesar, and he never fails to 
remind us that he himself was/(7rthe people, not <?/■ them. His 
latter speeches, owing partly to his delivery, blamed as too Asiatic, 
were less successful. To a reader the three seem much on the 
same level. They are clever, but evidently set performances, and 
leave us no ground to suppose that the poet's abandonment of a 
parliamentary career was a serious loss to the nation. 

On the 29th of February the first and second cantos of Childe 
Hurold appeared. An early copy was sent to Mrs. Leigh, with 
the inscription: " To Augusta, my dearest sister and my best 
friend, who has ever loved me much better than I deserved, this 
volume is presented by her father's son and most affectionate 
brother, B." The book ran through seven editions in four weeks. 
The effect of the first edition of Burns, and the sale of Scott's Lays, 
are the only parallels in modern poetic literature to this success. 
All eyes were suddenly fastened on the author, who let his satire 
sleep, and threw politics aside, to be the romancer of his day, and 
for two years the darling of society. Previous to the publication, 
Mr. Moore confesses to have gratified his lordship with the expres- 
sion of the fear that Childe Harold was too good for the age. Its 
success was due to the reverse being the truth. It was just on the 
level of its age. Its flowing verse, defaced by rhymical faults per- 
ceptible only to finer ears, its prevailing sentiment, occasional bold- 
ness relieved by pleasing platitudes, its half affected rakishness, 
here and there elevated by a rush as of morning air, and its frequent 
richness — not 3-et, as afterwards, splendour — of description, were 
all appreciated by the fashionable London of the Regency ; while 
the comparatively mild satire, not keen enovigh to scarify, only gave 
a more piquant flavour to the whole. Byron's genius, yet in the 
green leaf, was not too far above the clever masses of pleasure- 



54 



BYRON. 



loving manhood by which it was surrounded. It was natural that 
the address on the reopening of Drury Lane Theatre should be^ 
written by " the world's new joy " — the first great English poet-' 
peer; as natural as that in his only published satire of the period 
he should inveigh against almost the only amusement in which he 
could not share. The address was written at the request of Lord 
Holland, when of some hundred competitive pieces none had been 
found exactly suitable — a circumstance which gave rise to the fa- 
mous parodies entitled The Rejected Addresses — and it was thought 
tiiat the ultimate choice would conciliate all rivalry. The care 
which Byron bestowed on the correction of the first draft of this 
piece is characteristic of his habit of writing off his poems at a 
gush, and afterwards carefully elaborating them. 

The Waltz was published anonymously in April, 1813. It was 
followed in May by the Giaour, the first of the flood of verse ro- 
mances which, during the three succeeding years, he poured forth 
with impetuous fluency, and which were received with almost un- 
restrained applause. The plots and sentiments and imagery are 
similar in them all. The Giaour steals the mistress of Hassan, 
who revenges his honour by drowning her. The Giaour escapes ; 
returns, kills Hassan, and then goes to a monastery. In \he.'Bride 
of Abydos, published in the December of the same year, Giaffir 
wants to marry his daughter Zuleika to Carasman Pasha. She runs 
off with Selim, her reputed brother — in reality her cousin, and so 
at last her legitimate lover. They are caught; he is slain in fight; 
she dies, to slow music. In the Corsair, published January, 1814, 
Conrad, a pirate, and man of " one virtue and a thousand crimes ! " 
is beloved by Medora, who, on his predatory expeditions, sits wait- 
ing for him (like Hassan's and Sisera's mother) in a tower. On 
one of these he attacks Seyd Pasha, and is overborne by superior 
force ; but Gulnare, a female slave of Seyd, kiils her master, and 
runs off with Conrad, who finds Medora dead and vanishes. In 
Lara, the sequel to this — written in May and June, published in 
August — a man of mystery appears in the Moreo, with a page, 
Kaled. After adventures worthy of Mrs. Radcliffe — from whose 
Schledoni the Giaour is said to have been drawn — Lara falls in 
battle with his deadly foe, Ezzelin, and turns out to be Conrad, 
while Kaled is of course Gulnare. The Hebrew Melodies, written 
in December. 1814, are interesting, in connexion with the author's 
early familiarity with the Old Testament, and from the force and 
music that mark the best of them ; but they can hardly be consid- 
ered an important contribution to the devotional verse of England. 
The Siege of Cornith and Parisina, composed after his marriage in 
the summer and autumn of 181 5, appeared in the following year. 
The former is founded on the siege of the city, when the Turks 
took it from Menotti ; but our attention is concentrated on Alp 
the renegade, another sketch from the same protoplastic ruffian, 
who leads on the Turks, is in love with the daughter of the gover- 
nor of the city, tries to save her, but dies. The poem is frequently 
vigorous, but it ends badly. Parisina, though unequal, is on the 



Br RON. 



55 



whole a poem of a higher order than the others of the period. The 
trial scene exhibits some dramatic power, and the shriek of the 
lady mingling with Ugo's funeral dirge lingers in our ears, along 
with the convent bells — 

" In the grey square turret swinging, 
With a deep sound, to and fro, 
Heavily to the heart they go." 

These romances belong to the same period of the author's poetic 
career as the first two cantos of Childe Harold. They followed 
one another like brilliant fireworks. They all exhibit a command 
of words, a sense of melody, and a flow of rhythm and rhyme, which 
mastered Moore and even Scott on their own ground. None of them 
are wanting in passages, as "He that hath bent him o'er the dead," 
and the description of Alp leaning against a column, which strike 
deeper than any verse of either of those writers. But there is an 
air of melodrama in them all. Harmonious delights of novel read- 
ers, they will not stand against the winnowing wind of deliberate 
criticism. They harp on the same string without the variation of 
a Paganini. They are potentially endless reproductions of one 
phase of an ill-regulated mind — the picture of the same quasi-mel- 
ancholy vengeful man, who knows no friend but a dog, and reads 
on the tombs of the great only " the glory and the nothing of a 
name," the exile who cannot flee from himself, "the wandering 
outlaw of his own dark mind," who has not loved the world nor 
the world him — 

" Whose heart was form'd for softness, warp'd by wrong, ' 
Betray'd too early, and beguiled too long " — 

all this, decies 7-epetita, grows into a weariness and vexation. Mr. 
Carlyle harshly compares it to the screaming of a meat-jack. The 
reviewers and the public of the time thought differently. Jeffrey, 
penitent for the ez-rly faux pas of his Review, as Byron remained 
penitent for his answering assault, writes of Lara, " Passages of it 
may be put into competition with anything that poetry has pro 
duced in point either of pathos or energy." Moore — who after 
wards wrote, not to Byron, that seven devils had entered into 
Manfred — professes himself" enraptured with it." Fourteen thou 
sand copies of the Corsair were sold in a day. But hear the au 
thor's own half-boast, half-apology : " Zar« I wrote while undress 
ing after coming home from balls and masquerades, in the year of 
revelry 1814. The Bride wd^?, written in four, the Corsair m ten 
days. This I take to be a humiliating confession, as it proves mj 
own want of judgment in publishing, and the public's in reading, 
things which cannot have stamina for permanence." 

The pecuniary profits accruing to Byron from his works began 
with Lara, for which he received 700/. He had made over to Mr. 
Dallas, besides other gifts to the same ungrateful recipient, the 



56 



BYRON. 



profits of Harold, amounting to 600/., and of the Corsair, which 
brought 525/. The proceeds of the Giaour and the Bride were 
also surrendered. 

During this period, 1813-1816, he had become familiar with all 
the phases of London society, " tasted their pleasures," and, 
towards the close, " felt their decay." His associates in those 
years were of two classes — men of the world, and autliors. Feted 
and courted in all quarters, he patronised the theatres, became in 
181 5 a member of the Drury Lane Committee, liked the dandies." 
including Beau Brummell, and was introduced to the Regent, 
Their interview, in June, 1812, in the course of which the latter 
paid unrestrained compliments to Harold and the poetry of Scott, 
is naively referred to Mr. Moore " as reflecting even still more 
honour on the Sovereign himself than on the two poets." Byron, 
in a different spirit, writes to Lord Holland : " I have now great 
hope, in the event of Mr. Pope's decease, of warbling truth at Court, 
like Mr. Mallet of indifferent memory. Consider, one hundred 
marks a year ! besides the wine and the disgrace." We can hardly 
conceive the future author of the Vision of Judgment writing odes 
to dictation. He does not seem to have been much fascinated with 
the first gentleman of Europe, whom at no distant date he assailed 
in the terrible " Avatar," and left the laureateship to Mr. Southey. 

Among leaders in art and letters he was brought into more or 
less intimate contact with Sir Humphry Davy, the Edgeworths, 
Sir James Mackintosh, Colman the dramatic author, the elder Kean, 
Monk Lewis, Grattan, Curran, and Madame de Stael. Of the 
meeting of the last two he remarks, " It was like the confluence of 
the Rhone and the Saone, and they were both so ugly that I could 
not help wondering how the best intellects of France and Ireland 
could have taken up respectively such residences." 

About this time a communication from Mr. Murray, in reference 
to the meeting with the Regent, led to a letter from Sir Walter Scott 
to Lord Byron, the beginning of a life-long friendship, and one of 
the most pleasing pages of biography. These two great men were 
for a season perpetually pitted against one another as the foremost 
competitors for literary favour. When ^c/^^^y came out, contem- 
poraneously with the Giaour, the undergraduates of Oxford and 
Cambridge ran races to catch the first copies, and laid bets as to 
which of the rivals would win. During the anti-Byronic fever of 
r<54o-i86o they were perpetually contrasted as the representatives 
of the manly and the morbid schools. A later sentimentalism has 
affected to despise the work of both. The fact, therefore, that 
from an early period the men themselves knew each other as they 
were is worth illustrating. 

Scott's letter, in which a generous recognition of the pleasure 
he had derived from the work of the English poet, was followed 
by a manly remonstrance on the subject of theattack in the Bards 
and Reviewers, drew from Byron in the following month (July, 
181 2) an answer in the same strain, descanting on the Prince's 
praises of the Lay and Marjnion, and candidly apologising for the 



BYRON. 57 

" evil works of his nonage." " This satire," he remarks, "was 
written when I was very young and very angry, and fully bent on 
displaying my wrath and my wit ; and now I am haunted by the 
ghosts of my wholesale assertions," This, in turn, called forth 
another letter to Byron, eager for more of his verses, with a cor- 
dial invitation to Abbotsford on the ground of Scotland's maternal 
claim on him, and asking for information about Pegasus and Par- 
nassus. After this the correspondence continues with greater 
freedom, and the same display on either side of mutual respect. 
When Scott says, "the Giaour \s praised among our mountains," 
and Byron returns, " Waverley is the best novel I have read," 
there is no suspicion of flattery — it is the interchange of compli- 
ments between men, 

" Et cantare pares et respondere parati." 

They talk in just the same manner to third parties. " I gave over 
writing romances," says the elder, in the spirit of a great-hearted 
gentlemen, " because Byron beat me. He hits the mark where I 
don't even pretend to fledge my arrow. He has access to a stream 
of sentiment unknown to me." The younger, on the other hand, 
deprecates the comparisons that were being invidiously drawn be- 
tween them. He presents his copy of the Giaour to Scott, with 
the phrase, "To the monarch of Parnassus," and compares the 
feeling of those who cavilled at his fame to that of the Athenians 
towards Aristides. From those sentiments he never swerves, 
recognising to the last the breadth of character of the most gener- 
ous of his critics, and referring to him, during his later years in 
Italy, as the Wizard and the Ariosto of the North. A meeting 
was at length arranged between them. Scott looked forward to it 
with anxious interest, humorously remarking that Byron should 
say — . 

" Art thou the man whom men famed Grissell call? 

And he reply — 

" Art thou the still more famed Tom Thumb the small ? " 

They met in London during the spring of 1815. The follow- 
ing sentences are from Sir Walter's account of it : "Report had 
prepared me to meet a man of peculiar habits and quick temper, 
and I had some doubts whether we were likely to suit each other 
in society. I was most agreeably disappointed in this respect. I 
found Lord Byron in the highest degree courteous, and even kind. 
We met for an hour or two almost daily in Mr. Murray's drawing- 
room, and found a great deal to say to each other. Our senti- 
ments agreed a good deal, except upon the subjects of religion and 
pohtics, upon neither of which I was inclined to believe that Lord 
Byron entertained very fixed opinions. On politics he used some- 
times to express a high strain of what is now called Liberalism ; 



58 BYRON. 

but it appeared to me that the pleasure it afforded him as a vehicle 
of displaying his wit and satire against individuals in office was at 
the bottom of this habit of thinking. At heart, I would have 
termed Byron a patrician on principle. His reading did not seem 
to me to have been very extensive. I remember repeating to him 
the fine poem of Hardyknute, and some one asked me what I could 
possibly have been telling Byron by which he was so much agi- 
tated. I saw him for the last time in (September) 1815, after I 
returned from France ; he dined or lunched with me at Long's in 
Bond Street. I never saw him so full of gaiety and good humour. 
The day of this interview was the most interesting I ever spent. 
Several letters passed between us — one perhaps every half year. 
Like the old heroes in Homer, we exchanged gifts ; I gave Byron 
a beautiful dagger mounted with gold, which had been the property 
of the redoubted Elfi Bey. But I was to play the part of Diomed 
in the Iliad, for Byron sent me, some time after, a large sepulchral 
vase of silver, full of dead men's bones, found within the land 
walls of Athens. He was often melancholy, almost gloomy. When 
I observed him in this humour I used either to wait till it went off 
of its own accord, or till some natural and easy mode occurred of 
leading him into conversation, when the shadows almost always 
left his countenance, like the mist arising from a landscape. I 
think I also remarked in his temper starts of suspicion, when he 
seemed to pause and consider whether there had not been a secret 
and perhaps offensive meaning in something that was said to him. 
In this case I also judged it best to let his mind, like a troubled 
spring, work itself clear, which it did in a minute or two. A down- 
right steadiness of manner was the way to his good opinion. Will 
Rose, looking by accident at his feet, saw him scowling furiously; 
but on his showing no consciousness, his lordship resumed his 
easy manner. What I liked about him, besides his boundless 
genius, was his generosity of spirit as well as of purse, and utter 
contempt of all the affectations of literature. He like Moore and 
me because, with all our other differences, we were both good- 
natured fellows, not caring to maintain our dignity, enjoying the 
7)iot-poiir-rire. He wrote from impulse, never from effort, and 
therefore I have always reckoned Burns and Byron the most gen 
uine poetic geniuses of my time, and of half a century before me. 
We have many men of high poetic talents, but none of that ever- 
gushing and perennial fountain of natural waters." 

Scott, like all hale men of sound sense, regretted the almost 
fatal incontinence which, in the year of his greatest private troubles, 
led his friend to make a parade of them before the public. He 
speaks more than once of his unhappy tendency to exhibit himself 
as the dying gladiator, and even compares him to his peacock, 
screeching before his window because he chooses to bivouac apart 
from his mate ; but he read a copy of the Ravenna diary without 
altering his view that his lordship was his own worst maligner. 
Scott, says Lockhart, considered Byron the only poet of trans- 
cendent talents we had had since Dryden. There is preserved a 



BYRON. 59 

curious record of his meeting with a greater poet than Dryden, but 
one whose greatness neither" he nor Scott suspected. Mr. Crabbe 
Robinson reports Wordsworth to have said, in Charles Lamb's 
chambers, about the year 1808, "These reviewers put me out of 
patience. Here is a young man who has written a volume of poe- 
try ; and these fellows, just because he is a lord, set upon him. 
The young man will do something, if he goes on as he has begun. 
But these reviewers seem to think that nobody may write poetry 
unless he lives in a garret." Years after. Lady Byron, on being 
told this, exclaimed, -'Ah, if Byron had known that, he would 
never have attacked Wordsworth. He went one day to meet hmi 
at dinner, and I said, ' Well, how did the young poet get on with 
the old one ?' 'Why, to tell the truth,' said Ine, ' I had but one 
feeling from the beginning of the visit to the end, and that was 
reverence: " Similarly, he began by being on good terms with 
Southey, and after a meeting at Holland House, wrote enthusiasti- 
callv of his prepossessing appearance. 

'Byron and the leaders of the so-called Lake School were, at 
starting, common heirs of the revolutionary spirit ; they were, either 
in their social views or personal feelings', to a large extent influ- 
enced by the most morbid, though in some respects the most 
magnetic, genius of modern France, J. J. Rousseau ; but their 
temperaments were in many respects fundamentally diverse ; and 
the pre-established discord between them ere long began to make 
itself manifest in their following out widely divergent paths. 
Wordsworth's return to nature had been preluded by Cowper ; that 
of Byron by Burns. The revival of the one ripened into a restora- 
tion of similar manners and old beliefs ; the other was the spirit of 
the storm. When they had both become recognised powers, 
neither appreciated the work of the other. A few years after this 
date Byron wrote of Wordsworth, to a common admirer of both : 
" I take leave to differ from you as freely as I once agreed with 
you. His performances, since the Lyrical Ballads, are miserably 
inadequate to the ability that lurks within him. There is, un- 
doubtedly, much natural talent spilt over the Excursion; but it is 
rain upon rocks, where it stands and stagnates ; or rain upon sand, 
where it falls without fertilising." This criticism, with others in 
like strain, was addressed to Mr. Leigh Hunt, to whom, in 181 2, 
when enduring for radicahsm's sake a very comfortable incarcera- 
tion, Byron had, in company with Moore, paid a courteous visit. 

Of the correspondence of this period — flippant, trenchant, or 
sparkling— few portions are more calculated to excite a smile 
than the record of his frequent resolutions made, reasseverated, 
and broken, to have done with literature ; even going the length 
on some occasions of threatening to suppress his works, and, if 
possible, recall the existing copies. He affected being a man of 
the world unmercifully, ,^nd had a real deliii^ht in clever companions 
who assumed the same role. Frequent allusion is made to his in- 
tercourse with ErskJne and Sheridan ; the latter he is never tired 
of praising, as " the author of the best modern comed}' (^School for 



6o B YROiV. 

Scandal), the best farce {The Critic), and the best oration (the 
famous Begum speech) ever heard in this country." They spent 
many an evening together, and probably cracked many a bottle. 
It is Byron who tells the story of Sheridan being found in a gutter 
in a sadly incapable state ; and, on some one asking " Who is this ? " 
stammering out " Wilberforce." On one occasion he speaks of 
coming out of a tavern with the dramatist, when they both found 
the staircase in a very corkscrew condition ; and elsewhere, of en- 
countering a Mr. C , who " had no notion of meeting with a 

bon-vivant in a scribbler," and summed the poet's eulogy with the 
phrase, "he drinks like a man." Hunt, the tattler, who observed 
his lordship's habit in Italy, with the microscope of malice ensconced 
within the same walls, makes it a charge asrainst his host that he 
would not drink like a man. Once for all it may be noted, that 
although there was no kind of excess in which Byron, whether from 
bravado or inclination, failed occasionally to indulge, he was never 
for any stretch of time given over, like Burns, to what is techni- 
cally termed intemperance. His head does not seem to have 
been strong, and under the influence of stimulants he may have 
been led to talk a great deal of his dangerous nonsense. But 
though he could not sa}'-, with Wordsworth, that only once, at Cam- 
bridge, had his brain been "excited by the fumes of wine," his 
prevailing sins were in other directions. 



B YRON. 6l 



CHAPTER VI. 

MARRIAGE, AND FAREWELL TO ENGLAND. 

" As for poets," says Scott, " I have seen all the best of my 
time and country, and, though Burns had the most glorious eye 
imaginable, I never thought any of them would come up to an 
artist's notion of the character, except Byron. His countenance 
is a thing to dream of." Coleridge writes to the same effect, in 
language even stronger. We have from all sides similar testimony 
to the personal beauty which led the unhappiest of his devotees to 
exclaim, " That pale face is my fate ! " 

Southern critics, as De Chasles, Castelar, even Mazzini, have 
dealt leniently with the poet's relations to the other sex ; and 
EIze extends to him in this regard the same excessive stretch of 
charity. " Dear Childe Harold," exclaims the German professor, 
" was positively besieged by women. They have, in truth, no right 
to complain of him : from his childhood he had seen them on their 
worst side." It is the casuistry of hero- worship to deny that Byron 
was unjust to women, not merely in isolated instances, but in his 
prevailing views of their character and claims. " 1 regard them," 
he say's, in a passage only distinguished from others by more ex- 
travagant petulance, " as very pretty but inferior creatures, who are 
as little in their place at our tables as they would be in our council 
chambers. The whole of the present system with regard to the 
female sex is a remnant of the barbarism of the chivalry of our 
forefathers. I look on them as grown-up children; but, like a fool- 
ish mamma, I am constantly the slave of one of them. The Turks 
shut up their women, and are much happier ; give a woman a look- 
ing-glass and burnt almonds, and she will be content." 

In contrast with this, we have the moods in which he drew his 
pictures of Angiolina, and Haidee, and Aurora Raby, and wrote tlie 
invocations to the shade of Astarte, and his letters in "prose and 
verse to Augusta ; but the above passage could never have been 
written by Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakspeare, or Shelley. The 
class whom he was reviling seemed, however, during "the day of 
his destiny," bent on confirming his judgment by the blindness of 
their worship. His rank and fame, the glittering splendour of his 
verse, the romance of his travels, his picturesque melancholy and 
affectation of mysterious secrets, combined with the magic of his 



62 BYRON. 

presence to bewitch and bewilder them. Tlie dissenting malcorr 
tents, condemned as prudes and blues, had their revenge. Gen* 
erally, we may say that women who had not written books adored 
Byron ; women who had written or were writing books distrusted, 
disliked, and made him a moral to adorn their tales, often to point 
their fables with. He was by the one set caressed and spoilt, and 
"beguiled too long; " by the other, ''betrayed too late." The re- 
cent memoirs of Frances Ann Kemble present a curious record of 
the process of passing from one extreme to tlie other. She dwells 
on the fascination exerted over her mind by the first reading of his 
poetry, and tells how she '-fastened on the book with a grip like 
steel," and carried it off and hid it under her pillow ; how it affected 
her " like an evil potion," and stirred her whole being with a 
tempest of excitement, till finally she, with equal weakness, flung it 
aside, " resolved to read that grand poetry no more, and broke 
through the thraldom of that powerful spell." The confession 
brings before us a type of the transitions of the century, on its way 
from the Byronic to the anti-Byronic fever, of which later state Mrs. 
Jamieson, Mrs. Norton, and Mrs. Martineau are among the most 
pronounced representatives. 

Byron's garrulity with regard to those delicate matters on which 
men of more prudence or chivalry are wont to set the seal of 
silence, has often the same practical effect at reticence ; for he 
talks so much at large — every page of his Journal being, by his 
own admission, apt to " confute and abjure its predecessor " — that 
we are often none the wiser. Amid a mass of conjecture, it is mani- 
fest that during the years between his return from Greece and final 
expatriation (1811-1816), including the whole period of his social 
glory — though not yet of his solid fame — he was lured into liaisons 
of all sorts and shades. Some, now acknowledged as innocent, 
were blared abroad by tongues less skilled in pure invention than in 
distorting truth. On others, as commonplaces of a temperament 
"all meridian," it were waste of time to dwell. Byron rarely put 
aside a pleasure in his path ; but his passions were seldom unaccom- 
panied by affectionate emotions, genuine while they lasted. The 
verses to the memory of a lost love veiled as " Thyrza," of moderate 
artistic merit, were not, as Moore alleges, mere plays of imagina- 
tion, but records of a sincere grief.* Another intimacy exerted so 
much influence on this phase of the poet's career, that to pass it 
over would be like omitting Vanessa's name from the record of 
Swift. Lady Caroline Lamb, grandaughter of the first Earl Spencer, 
was one of those few women of our climate who, by their romantic 
impetuosity, recall the " children of the sun." She read Burns in 
her ninth year, and in her thirteenth idealised William Lamb 
(afterwards Lord Melbourne) as a statue of Liberty. In her nine- 
teenth (1805) she married him, and lived for some years, during which 
she was a reigning belle and toast, a domestic life only marred by 

* Mr. Trelawny says tliat Thyrza was a cousin, but that on this subject Byron was 
always reticent. Mr. Minto, as we have seen, associates her with the disguised girl of 
1807-8. 



B YRON. 63 

occasional eccentricities. Rogers, whom in a letter to Lady Morgan 
she numbers among her lovers, said she ought to know the new 
poet, who was three years her junior, and the introduction took 
place in March, 1812. After the meeting, she wrote in her journal, 
" Mad — bad — and dangerous to know ; " but, when the fashionable 
Apollo called at Melbourne House, she "flew to beautify her- 
self." Flushed by his conquest, he spent a great part of the fol- 
lowing year in her company, during which time the apathy or self- 
confidence of the husband laughed at the worship of the hero. 
" Conrad " detailed his travels and adventures, interested her by 
his woes, dictated her amusements, invited lier guests, and seems 
to have set rules to the establishment. " Medora," on the other 
hand, made no secret of her devotion, declared that they were affini- 
ties, and offered him her jewels. But after the first excitement, he 
beo-an to grow weary of her talk about herself, and could not praise 
her indifferent verses : " he grew moody, and she fretful, when their 
mutual egotisms jarred." Byron at length concurred in lier being 
removed for a season to her father's house in Ireland, on which 
occasion he wrote one of his glowing farewell letters. When she 
came back, matters were little" better. The would-be Juliet beset 
the poet with renewed advances, on one occasion penetrating to 
his rooms in the disguise of a page, on another threatening to stab 
herself with a pair of scissors, and again, developing into a Medea, 
offering her gratitude to any one who would kill him. " The * Agnus ' 
is furious," he writes to Hodgson, in February, 181 3, in one of the 
somewhat ungenerous bursts to which he was too easily provoked. 
" You can have no idea of the horrible and absurd things she has 
said and done since (really from the best motives) I withdrew my 
homage. . . . The business of last summer I broke ofi, and now 
the amusement of the gentle fair is writing lettersHterally threaten- 
ing my life." With one member of the family, Lady IVIelbourne, 
Mr. Lamb's mother, and sister of Sir Ralph Mil'banke, he remained 
throughout on terms of pleasant intimacy. He appreciated the 
talent and sense, and was ready to profit by the experience and tact 
of " the cleverest of women." But her well-meant ad^vice had un- 
fortunate results, for it was on her suggestion that he became a 
suitor for the hand of her niece. Miss Milbanke. Byron first pro- 
posed to this lady in 1813 ; his offer was refused, but so graciously 
that they continued to correspond on friendly, which graduallv 
grew into intimate terms, and his second offer, towards the close of 
the following year, was accepted. 

After a series of vain protests, and petulant warnings against 
her cousin by marriage, who she said was punctual at church, and 
learned, and knew statistics, but was " not for Conrad, no, no, no ! " 
Lady Caroline lapsed into an attitude of fixed hostility ; and shortly 
after the crash came, and her predictions were realised, vented her 
wrath in the now almost forgotten novel of Glcnarvon, in which 
some of Byron's real features were represented in conjunction with 
many fantastic additions. Madame de Stael was kind enough to 
bring a copy of the book before his notice when they met at the Lake 



64 BYRON. 

of Geneva, but he seems to have been less moved by it than "by 
most attacks. We must, however, bear in mind his own admission 
in a parallel case. " I say I am perfectly calm ; I am, nevertheles.s, 
in a fury." Over the sad vista of remaining years of the unhappy 
lady's life we need not linger. During a considerable part of it 
she api^ears hovering about the thin line that separates some kind 
of wit and passion from madness; writing more novels, burning 
her hero's effigy and letters, and then clamouring for a lock of his 
hair, or a sight of his portrait ; separated from, and again recon- 
ciled to, a husband to whose magnanimous forbearance and com- 
passion she bears testimony to the last, comparing herself to Jane 
Shore; attempting Byronic verses, loudly denouncing and yet never 
ceasing inwardly to idolise, the man whom she regarded as her be- 
trayer, perhaps only with justice in that he had unwittingly helped 
to overthrow her mental balance. After eight years of this life, lit 
up here and there by gleams of social brilliancy, we find her car- 
riage, on the 1 2th of July, 1824, suddenly confronted by a funerah 
On hearing that the remains of Byron were being carried to the 
tomb, she shrieked, and fainted. Her health finally sank, and her 
mind gave way under this shock ; but she lingered till January, 
1828, when she died, after writing a calm letter to her husband, 
and bequeathing the poet's miniature to her friend. Lady Morgan. 
" I have paid some of my debts, and contracted others," Byron 
■writes to Moore, on September 15, 1814; " but I have a few thou- 
sand pounds which I can't spend after my heart in this climate, and 
so I shall go back to the south. I want to see Venice and the 
Alps, and Parmesan cheeses, and look at the coast of Greece from 
Italy! All this, however, depends upon an event which may or 
may not happen. Whether it, will, I shall probably know to-mor- 
raw ; and if it does, I can't well go abroad at present." " A wife," 
he had written, in the January of the same year, "would be my salva- 
tion ; " but a marriage entered upon in such a flippant frame of mind 
could scarcely have been other than disastrous. In the autumn 
of the year we are told that a friend,* observing how cheerless 
was the state both of his mind and prospects, advised him to marry, 
and after much discussion he consented, naming to his correspon- 
dent Miss Milbanke. To this his adviser, objected remarking that 
she had, at present, no fortune, and that his embarrassed affairs 
would not allow him to marry without one, &c. Accordingly, he 
agreed that his friend should write a proposal to another lady, 
wliich was done. A refusal arrived as they were one morning sit- 
ting together, "'You see,' said Lord Byron, 'that after all Miss 
MiTbaifke is to be the person,' and wrote on the moment. His 
friend, still remonstrating against his choice, took up the letter ; 
but, on reading it, observed, ' Well, really, this is a pretty letter; 
it is a pity it should not go.' ' Then it shall go,' said Lord Byron, 
and, in so saying, sealed and sent off this fiat of his fate." The 
incident seems cut from a French novel ; but so does the whole 

• Doubtless Moore himself, who tells the Ftory. 



BYRON. 65 

strange story— the one apparently insoluble enigma in an otherwise 
only too transparent life. On the arrival of the lady's answer he 
was seated at dinner, when his gardener came in and presented him 
with his mother's wedding-ring, lost many years before, and which 
had just been found, buried in the mould beneath her window. 
Almost at the same moment the letter arrived ; and Byron ex- 
claimed " If it contains a consent (which it did), I will be married 
with this very ring." He had the highest anticipations ot his 
bride, appreciating her "talents, and excellent qualities;" and 
saying, "she is so good a person that I wishl was a better. 
About the same date he writes to various friends in the good spirits 
raised by his enthusiastic reception from the Cambridge under- 
graduates, when in the course of the same month he went to the 
Senate House to give his vote for a Professor of Anatomy. 

The most constant and best of those friends was his sister, 
Augusta Leigh, whom, from the death of Miss Chaworth to his 
own, Byron, in the highest and purest sense of the world, loved 
more than any other human being. Tolerant of errors which she 
lamented, and violences in which she had no share, she had a touch 
of their common family pride, most conspicuous in an almost cat- 
hke clinging to their ancestral home. Her early published letters 
are full of regrets about the threatened sale of Newstead, on the 
adjournment of which, when the first purchaser had to pay 25,000/. 
for breaking his bargain, she rejoices, and over the consummation 
of which she mourns, in the manner of Milton's Eve — 

" Must I then leave thee, Paradise ? " 

In all her references to the approaching marriage there are 
blended notes of hope and fear. In thanking Hodgson for his 
kind congratulations, she trusts it will secure her brother's hap- 
piness. Later she adds her testimony to that of all outsiders at 
this time, as to the graces and genuine worth of the object of his 
choice. After the usual preliminaries, the ill-fated pair were united, 
at Seaham House, on the 2nd of January, 181 5. Byron was married 
like one walking in his sleep. He trembled like a leaf, made the 
wrong responses, and almost from the first seems to have been 
conscious of his irrevocable mistake. 

*' I saw him stand 
Before an altar with a gentle bride : 
Her face was fair, but was not that which made 
The starlight of his boyhood. He could see 
Not that which was — but that which should have been — 
But the old mansion, the accustom'd hall. 
And she who was his destiny came back, 
And thrust herself between him and the light." 

Here we have faint visions of Miss Chaworth, mingling with 
later memories. In handing the bride into the carriage he" said, 
" Miss Milbanke, are you ready ? " — a mistake said tobe of evil 
omen. Byron never really loved his wife ; and though he has been 
absurdly accused of marrying for revenge, we must suspect that he 

5 



66 BYRON. 

married in part for a settlement. On the other hand, it is not unfair 
to say that she was fascinated by a name, and inspired by the phil- 
anthropic zeal of reforming a literary Corsair. Both were disap- 
pointed. Miss Miibanke's fortune was mainly settled on lierseif; 
and Byron, in spite of plentiful resolutions, gave little sign of re- 
i'ormaiion. For a considerable time their life, which, after the 
'■ treacle moon," as the bridegroom called it, spent at Halnaby, 
near DarUngton, was divided betvi'een residence at Seaham and 
visits to London, seemed to move smoothly. In a letter, evidently 
mis-dated the 15th December, Mrs. Leigh writes to Hodgson : '• I 
have every reason to think that my beloved B. is very happy and 
comfortable. I hear constantly from him and his rib. It appears 
to me that Lady B. sets about making him happy in the right way. 
I had many fears. Thank God that they do not appear likely to be 
realised. In short there seems to me to be but one drawback to 
all our felicity, and that, alas, is the disposal of dear Nevvstead. 1 
never shall feel reconciled to the loss of that sacred revered Abbey. 
The thought makes me more melancholy than perhaps the loss of 
an inaniniate object ought to do. Did you ever hear that landed 
property, the gift of the Crown, could not be sold.^ Lady B. 
writes me that she never saw her father and mother so happy ; 
that she believes the latter would go to the bottom of the sea her- 
self to find fish for B.'s dinner, &c." Augusta Ada was born in 
London on the loth of December, 1815. During the next months 
a few cynical mutterings are the only interruptions to an ominous 
silence ; but these could be easily explained by the increasing em- 
barrassment of the poet's affairs, and the importunity of creditors, 
who in the course of the last half-year had serv-ed seven or eight 
executions on his house and furniture. Their ex])ectations were 
raised by exaggerated reports of his having married money ; and by a 
curious pertinacity of pride he still declined, even when he had to 
sell his books to accept advances from his publisher. In January 
the storm which had been secretly gathering suddenly broke. On 
the 15th, /. e., five weeks after her daughter's birth. Lady Byron 
left home with the infant to pay a visit, as had been agreed, to her 
own family at Kirkby Mallory, in Leicestershire. On the way she 
despatched to her husband a tenderly playful letter, which has been 
often quoted. Shortly afterwards he was informed — first by her 
father, and then by herself — that she did not intend ever to return 
to him. The accounts of their last interview, as in the whole 
evidence bearing on the affair, not only differ, but flatly contradict 
one another. On behalf of Lord Byron it is asserted that his 
wife, infuriated by his offering so\-ne innocent hospitality on occa- 
sion of bad weather to a respectable actress, Mrs. Mardyn, who 
had called on hir^ about Drury Lane business, rushed into the 
room, exclaiming, " I leave you forever " — and did so. According 
to another story. Lady Byron, finding him witli a friend, and ob- 
serving him to be annoyed at lier entrance, said, "Am I in your 
way, Byron V whereupon he answered, " Damnably." Mrs. Leigh, 
Hodgson, Moore, and otners did everything that mutual friends 



BYRON. 6- 

could do to bring about the reconciliation for which Byron himself 
professed to be eager, but in vain ; and in vain the effort was re- 
newed in later years. The wife was inveterately bent on a separ- 
ation, of the causes of which the husband alleged he was never 
informed, and with regard to which as long as he lived she pre- 
served a rigid silence. 

For some time after the event Byron spoke of his wife with at 
least apparent generosity. Rightly or wrongly, he blamed her 
parents, and her maid— Mrs. Clermont, the theme of his scathing 
but not always dignified " Sketch ; " but of herself he wrote (March 
8, 1816), " I do not beheve that there ever was a brighter, and a 
kmder, or a more amiable or agreeable being than Lady Byron. I 
never had nor can have any reproach to make to her, when with 
me." Elsewhere he adds, that he would willingly, if he had the 
chance, " renew his marriage on a lease of twenty years." But as 
time passed and his overtures were rejected, his patience gave way, 
and in some of his later satires he even broke the bounds of courtesy. 
Lady Byron's letters at the time of the separation, especially those 
first pubUshed in the Academy of July 19, 1879, are to Mrs. Leigh 
always affectionate and confidential, often pathetic, asking her 
advice " in this critical moment," and protesting that, "independent 
of malady, she does not think of the past with any spirit of resent- 
ment, and scarcely with the sense of injury." In her comnmnica- 
tions to Mr. Hodgson, on the other hand — the first of almost the 
same date, the second a few weeks later — she writes with intense 
bitterness, stating that her action was due to offences which she 
could only condone on the supposition of her husband's insanity, 
and distinctly implying that she was in danger of her life. This 
supposition having been by her medical advisers pronounced 
erroneous, she felt, in the words only too pungently recalled in 
t>on Juati, that her duty both to man and God prescribed her 
course' of action. Her playful letter on leaving she seems to defend 
on the ground of the fear of personal violence. Till Lord Byron's 
death the intimacy between his wife and sister remained unbroken; 
through the latter he continued to send numerous messages to the 
former, and to his child, who became a ward in Chancery; but at a 
later date it began to cool. On the appearance of Lady Byron's 
letter, in answer to Moore's first volume, Augusta speaks of it as 
" a despicable tirade ; " feels " disgusted at such unfeeling con- 
duct ; " and thinks " nothing can justify any one in defaming the 
dead." Soon after 1830 they had an open rupture on a matter of 
business, which was never really healed, though the then Puritanic 
precisian sent a message of relenting to Mrs. Leigh on her death- 
bed (1851). 

The charge or charges which, during her husband's IHe, Lady 
Byron from magnanimity or other motive reserved, she is ascer- 
tained, after his death, to have delivered with important modifica- 
tions to various persons, with little regard to their capacity for 
reading evidence or to their discretion. On one occasion het 
choice of a confidante was singularly unfortunate. " These," 



68 BYRON. 

wrote Lord Byron in his youth, " these are the first tidings that 
have ever sounded hke fame in my ears — to be redde on the banks 
of the Ohio." Strangely enough, it is from the country of Wash- 
ington, whom the poet was wont to reverence as the purest patriot 
of the modern world, that in 1869 there emanated the hideous story 
which scandaHzed both continents, and uUimately recoiled on the 
retailer of the scandal. The grounds of the reckless charge have 
been weighed by those who have wished it to prove false, and by 
tiiose who have wished it to prove true, and found wanting. The 
chaff has been beaten in every way and on all sides, without yield- 
ing a particle of grain ; and it were ill-advised to rake up the 
noxious dust that alone remains. From nothing left on record by 
either of the two persons most intimately concerned can we derive 
any reliable information. It is plain that Lady Byron was during 
the later years of her life the victim of hallucinations, and that if 
Byron knew the secret, which he denies, he did not choose to tell 
it, putting off Captain Medwin and others with absurdities, as that 
" He did not like to see women eat," or with commonplaces, as 
" The causes, my dear sir, were too simple to be found out." 

Thomas Moore, who had the Memoirs * supposed to have 
thrown light on the mystery, in the full knowledge of Dr. Lushing- 
ton's judgment and all the gossip of the day, professes to believe that 
" the causes of disunion did not differ from those that loosen the 
links of most such marriages," and writes several pages on the trite 
theme that great genius is incompatible with domestic happiness. 
Negative instances abound to modify this sweeping generalisation ; 
but there is a kind of genius, closely associated with intense irri- 
tability, which it is difficult to subject to the most reasonable yoke ; 
and of this sort was Byron's. His valet, Fletcher, is reported to 
have said that " Any woman could manage my lord, except my 
lady ; " and Madame De Stael, on reading the Farewell, that " Sfie 
v/ould have been glad to have been in Lady Byron's place." But 
it may be doubted if Byron would have made a good husband to 
any woman ; his wife and he were even more than usually ill- 
assorted. A model of the proprieties, and a pattern of the learned 
philanthropy of which in her sex he was wont to make a constant 
butt, she was no fit consort for that " mens insana in corpore 
insano." What could her placid temperament conjecture of a man 
whom she saw, in one of his fits of passion, throwing a favorite 
v/atch under the fire, and grinding it to pieces with a poker ? Or 
how could her conscious virtue tolerate the recurring irregularities 
which he was accustomed not only to permit himself but to parade ? 
The harassment of his affairs stimulated his violence, till she was 
inclined to suspect him to be mad. Some of her recently printed 
letters — as that to Lady Anne Barnard, and the reports of later 
observers of her character — as William Howitt, tend to detract 
from the earlier tributes to her consistent amiability, and confirm 
our ideas of the incompatibility of the pair. It must have been 

* Captain Trelawny, however, doubts if he ever read thetn. 



BYRON. 69 

trying to a poet to be asked by his wife, impatient of his late hours, 
when he was going to leave off writing verses ; to be told he had 
no real enthusiasm ; or to have his desk broken open, and its com- 
promising contents sent to the persons for whom they were least 
intended. The smouldering elements of discontent may have been 
fanned by the gossip of dependants, or the officious zeal of relatives, 
and kindled into a jealous flame by the ostentation of regard for 
others beyond the circle of his home. La^^y Byron doubtless be- 
lieved some story which, when communicated to her legal advisers, 
led them to the conclusion that the mere fact of her believing it 
made reconciliation impossible ; and the inveterate obstinacy which 
lurked beneath her gracious exterior made her cling through life 
to the substance — not always to the form, whatever that may have 
been — of her first impressions. Her later letters to Mrs. Leigh, 
as that called forth by Moore's Life, are certainly as open to the 
charge of self-righteousness as those of her husband's are to self- 
disparagement. 

Byron himself somewhere says, " Strength of endurance is 
worth all the talent in the world." " I love the virtues that I can- 
not share." His own courage was all active ; he had no power of 
sustained endurance. At a time when his proper refuge was 
silence, and his prevailing sentiment — for he admits he was some- 
how to blame — should have been remorse, he foolishly vented his 
anger and his grief in verses, most of them either peevish or vin- 
dictive, and some of which he certainly permitted to be published. 
" Woe to him," exclaims Voltaire, " who says all he could on any 
subject ! " Woe to him, he might have added, who says anything 
at all on the subject of his domestic troubles ! The poet's want 
of reticence at this crisis started a host of conjectures, accusations, 
and calumnies, the outcome, in some degree at least, of the ran- 
corous jealousy of men with whose adulation he was weary. Then 
began that burst of British virtue on which Macaulay has expatiated, 
and at which the social critics of the continent have laughed. 
Cottle, Cato, Oxoniensis, Delia, and Styles were let loose, and 
they anticipated the 6"cz/«r(/(r7>' and the 6)^i?(:/ia;/cr of 1869, so that 
the latter might well have exclaimed, " Pereant qui ante nos nostra 
dixerunt." Byron was accused of every possible and impossible 
vice. He was compared to Sardanapalus, Nero, Tiberius, the 
Duke of Orleans, Heliogabalus, and Satan — all the most disreputable 
persons mentioned in sacred and profane history ; his benevolences 
were maligned, his most disinterested actions perverted. Mrs, 
Mardyn, the actress, was on his account, on one occasion, driven 
off the public stage. He was advised not to go to the theatres, 
lest he should be hissed ; nor to Parliament, lest he should be in- 
sulted. On the very day of his departure a friend told him that he 
feared violence from mobs assembling at the door of his carriage. 
" Upon what grounds," the poet writes, in an incisive survev of 
the circumstances, in August, 1819, "the public formed their 
opinion, I am not aware ; but it was general, and it was decisive. 
Of me and of mine they knew little, except that I had written 



)o 



BYRON. 



poetry, was a nobleman, had married, became a father, and was in- 
volved in differences with my wife and her relatives — no one knew 
why, because the persons complaining refused to state their griev- 
ances. 

" The press was active and scurrilous ; . . . my name — which 
had been a knightly or a noble one since my fathers helped to con- 
quer the kingdom for William the Norman — was tainted. I felt 
that, if what was whispered and muttered and murmured was true, I 
was unfit for England ; if false, England was unfit for me. I with- 
drew; but this was not enough. In other countries — in Switzer- 
land, in the shadow of the Alps, and by the blue depth of the lakes 
— I was pursued and breathed upon by the same blight. 1 crossed 
the mountains, but it was the same ; so I went a little farther, and 
settled myself by the waves of the Adriatic, like the stag at bay, 
who betakes himself to the waters." 

On the 1 6th of April, 1816, shortly before his departure, he 
wrote to Mr. Rogers : " My sister is now with me, and leaves 
town to-morrow. We shall not meet again for some time, at all 
events, if ever (it was their final meeting), and under these circum- 
stances I trust to stand excused to you and Mr. Sheridan for be- 
ing unable to wait upon him this evening." In all this storm and 
stress, Byron's one refuge was in the affection which rises like a 
well of purity amid the passions of his turbid life. 

" In the desert a fountain is springing, 
In the wild waste there still is a tree ; 
And a bird iu the solitude singing, 
That speaks to my spirit of thee." 

The fashionable world was tired of its spoilt child, and he of 
it. Hunted out of the country, bankrupt in purse and heart, he 
left it, never to return ; but he left it to find fresh inspiration by 
the "rushing of the arrowy Rhone," and under Italian skies to 
write the works which have immortalised his name. 







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72 



BYRON. 



CHAPTER VII. 

LIFE ABROAD. — SWITZERLAND TO VENICE. — THIRD PERIOD OF 
AUTHORSHIP. — CHILDE HAROLD, III., IV. — MANFRED. 

On the 25th of April, 181 6, Byron embarked for Ostend. 
From the " burning marl " of the staring streets he planted his 
foot again on the deck with a genuine exultation. 

" Once more upon the waters, yet once more, 
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed 
That knows her rider. Welcome to the roar ! 

But he brought with him a relic of English extravagance, setting 
out on his land travels in a huge coach, copied from that of Napo- 
leon taken at Genappe, and being accompanied by Fletcher, Rush- 
ton, Berger, a Swiss, and an Italian physician, called Polidori, son 
of Alfieri's secretary — a man of some talent but fatal conceit, A 
question arises as to the source from which he obtained the means 
for these and subsequent luxuries, in striking contrast with Gold- 
smith's walking-stick, knapsack, and flute. Byron's financial af- 
fairs are almost inextricably confused. We can, for instance, 
nowhere find a clear statement of the result of the suit regarding 
the Rochdale Estates, save that he lost it before the Court of Ex- 
chequer, and that his appeal to the House of Lords was still un- 
settled in 1822. The sale of Newstead to Colonel Wildman in 
181 8, for 90,000/., went mostly to pay off mortgages and debts. In 
April, 1869, Mrs. Leigh writes, after a last sigh over this event: 
" Sixty thousand pounds was secured by his (Byron's) marriage 
settlement, the interest of which he receives for life, and which 
ought to make him very comfortable." This is unfortunately de- 
cisive of the fact that he did not in spirit adhere to the resolution 
expressed to Moore never to touch a farthing of his wife's money, 
though we may accept his statement to Medwin, that he twice re- 
paid the dowry of 10.000/. brought to him at the marriage, as in so 
far diminishing the obligation. None of the capital of Lady Byron's 
family came under his control till 1822, when on the death of her 
mother, Lady Noel, Byron arranged the appointment of referees-— 
Sir Francis Burdett on his behalf, Lord Dacre on his wife's. The 
result was an equal division of a property worth about 7000/. a 



BYRON. 73 

year. While in Italy, the poet received, besides, about 10,000/. 
for his writings — 4000/. being given for Childe Harold (iii., iv.) 
Manfred. " Ne pas etre dupe " was one of his determinations, 
and, though he began by caring little for making money, he was 
always fond of spending it. "I tell you it is too much," he said 
to Murray, in returning a thousand guineaus for the Corinth and 
Parisina. Hodgson, Moore, Bland, Thomas Ashe, the family of 
Lord Falkland, the 'P-'tish Consul at Venice, and a host of others 
were ready to testily to his superb munificence. On the other 
hand, he would stint his pleasures, or his benevolence, which were 
among them, for no one ; and when he found that to spend money 
he had to make it, he saw neither rhyme nor reason in accepting 
less than his due. In 1817 he begins to dun Murray, declaring, 
with a frankness in which we can find no fault, "You offer 1500 
guineas for the new canto (C H., iv.). I won't take it. I ask 
2500 guineas for it, which you will either give or not, as you think 
proper." During the remaining years of his life he grew more and 
more exact, driving hard bargains for his houses, horses, and boats, 
and fitting himself, had he lived, to be Chancellor of the Exchequer 
in the newly-liberated State, from which he took a bond securing 
a fair interest for his loan. He made out an account in £ s. d. 
against the ungrateful Dallas, and when Leigh Hunt threatened to 
sponge upon him, he got a harsh reception ; but there is nothing 
to countenance the view that Byron was ever really possessed by 
the "good old gentlemanly vice" of which he wrote. The Skim- 
poles and Chadbands of the world are always inclined to talk of 
filthy lucre ; it is equally a fashion of really lavish people to boast 
that they are good men of business. 

We have only a few glimpses of Byron's progress. At Brussels 
the Napoleonic coach was set aside for a more serviceable caleche. 
During his stay in the Belgian capital he paid a visit to the scene 
of Waterloo, wrote the famous stanza beginning, " Stop, for thy 
tread is on an empire's dust ! " and, in unpatriotic prose, recorded 
his impressions of a plain which appeared to him to " want little 
but a better cause " to make it vie in interest with those of Platea 
and Marathon. 

The rest of his journey lay up the Rhine to Basle, thence to 
Berne, L^sanne and Geneva, where he settled for a time at tl^e 
Hotel Serlieron, on the western shor? of the lake. Here began 
the most interesting literary relationship of his life, for here he 
first came in contact with the impassioned Ariel of English verse, 
Percy Bysshe Shelley. They lived in proximity after they left the 
hotel, Shelley's headquarters being at Mont Alegre, and Byron's 
for the remainder of the summer at the Villa Diodati ; and their 
acquaintance rapidly ripened into an intimacy which, with some in- 
terruptions, extended over the six remaining years of their joint 
lives. The place for an estimate of their mutual influence belongs 
to the time of their Italian partnership. Meanwhile, we hear of 
them mainly as fellow-excursionists about the lake, which on one 
occasion, departing from its placid poetical character, all but swal- 



74 BYRON. 

lowed them both, along with Hobhouse, off Meillerie. " The 
boat," says Byron, " was nearly wrecked near the very spot where 
St. Preux and Julia were in danger of being drowned. It would 
have been classical to have been lost there, but not agreeable. I 
ran no risk, being so near the rocks and a good swimmer ; but our 
partv were wet and incommoded." The only anxiety of Shelley, 
who could not swim, was, that no one else should risk a life for his. 
Two such revolutionary or such brave poets were, in all probability, 
never before nor since in a storm in a boat together. During this 
period Byron complains of being still persecuted. " I was in a 
wretched state of health and worse spirits when I was in Geneva ; 
but quiet and the lake— better physicians than Polidori — soon set 
me up. I never led so moral a life as during my residence in that 
country, but I gained no credit by it. On the contrary, there is no 
story so absurd that they did not invent at my cost. I was watched 
by glasses on the opposite side of the lake, and by glasses, too, 
that must have had very distorted optics. I was waylaid in my 
evening drives. I believe they looked upon me as a man-monster." 
Shortly after his arrival in Switzerland he contracted an intimacy 
with Miss Clairmont, a daughter of Godwin's second wife, and 
consequently a connexion by marriage of the Shelleys, with whom 
she was living, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, Allegra, 
at Great Marlow, in February, 1817. The noticeable events of the 
following two months are a joint excursion to Chamouni, and a visit 
in July to Madame de Stael at Coppet, in the course of which he 
met Frederick Schlegel. During a wet week, when the families 
were reading together some German ghost stories, an idea occurred 
of imitating them, the main result of which was Mrs. Shelley's 
Frankenstein. Byron contributed to tlie scheme a fragment of 
The Vampire, afterwards completed and published in the name of 
his patron by Polidori. This eccentric physician now began to de- 
velope a vein of half insanity ; his jealousy of Shelley grew to such 
a pitch that it resulted in the doctor's sending a challenge to the 
poet. Shelley only laughed at this; but Byron, to stop furthef 
impertinences of the -kind, remarked, " Recollect that, though Shel- 
ley has scruples about dueling, I have none, and shall be at all 
times ready to take his place." Polidori had ultimately to be 
dismissed, and, after som6 years of absurd adventure, «)mmitted 
suicide. * 

The Sliellevs left for England in September, and Byron made 
an excursion with Hobliouse through the Bernese Oberland. They 
went by the Col de Jaman and the Simmenthal to Thun ; then up 
the valley to the Staubbach, wliich he compares to the tail of the 
pale horse in the Apocalypse — not a very happy, though a strik- 
ingcomparison; Tiience they proceeded over the Wengern to 
Grindelwald and the Rosenlau glacier ; then back by Berne, Fri- 
burji-. and Yverdun to Diodati. The following passage in reference 
to this tour may be selected a.s a specimen of his prose description, 
and of the ideas of mountaineering before the days of the Alpine 
Club:- ^ > i 



BYRON. 



75 



"Before ascending the mountain, went to the torrent again, the 
sun upon it forming a rainbow of the lower part, of all colours, but 
principally purple and gold, the bow moving as you move. 1 never 
saw anything like this ; it is only in the sunshine. . . . Left 
the horses, took off my coat, and went to the summit, 7000 English 
feet above the level of the sea, and 5000 feet above the valley we left 
in the morning. On one side our view comprised the Jungfrau, with 
all her glaciers ; then the Dent d'Argent, shining like truth ; then 
the Eighers and the Wetterhorn. Heard the avalanches falling 
every five minutes. From where we stood on the Wengern Alp we 
had all these in view on one side ; on the other, the clouds rose up 
from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices, like 
the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring tide ; it was white 
and sulphury, and immeasurably deep in appearance. . . . Ar- 
rived at the Grindelvvald ; dined ; mounted again, and rode to the 
higher glacier — like a frozen hurricane ; starlight beautiful, but a 
devil of a path. Passed whole woods of withered pines, all withered ; 
trunks stripped and barkless, branches lifeless ; done by a single 
winter. Their appearance reminded me of me and my family." 

Students of Manfred will recognise whole sentences, only 
slightly modified in its verse. Though Byron talks with contempt 
of authorship, there is scarce a fine phrase in his letters or journal 
which is not pressed into the author's service. He turns his deepest 
griefs to artistic gain, and uses five or six times, for literary pur- 
poses, the expression which seems to have dropped from him 
naturally about his household gods being shivered on his hearth. 
His account of this excursion concludes with a passage equally 
characteristic of his melancholy and incessant self-consciousness : — 

" In the weather for this tour I have been very fortunate. . . . 
I was disposed to be pleased. I am a lover of nature, &c. . . . But 
in all this the recollection of bitterness, and more especially of 
recent and more home desolation, which must accompany me 
through life, have preyed upon me here ; and neither the music of 
the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, the torrent, the moun- 
tain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, have for one moment 
lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my 
own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory 
around, above, and beneath me." 

Such egotism in an idle man would only provoke impatience ; 
but Byron was, during the whole of this period, almost preternat- 
urally active. Detained by bad weather at Ouchy for two davs 
(June 26, 27), he wrote the Prisoner of Chillo7i, which, with his 
noble introductorv sonnet on Bonnivard, in some respects surpasses 
any of his early romances. The opening lines — 

" Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls ; 
A thousand feet in depth below. 
Its massy waters meet and flow " — 

bring before us in a few words the conditions of a hopeless bond- 
age. The account of the prisoner himself, and of the lingering 



76 BYRON. 

deaths of the brothers ; the first frenzy of the survivor, and the 
desolation which succeeds it — 

" I only loved: I only drew 
The accursed breath of dungeon dew " — 

the bird's song breaking on the night of his solitude ; his growing 
enamoured of despair, and regaining his freedom with a sigh, are 
all strokes from a master hand. From the same place, at the same 
date, he announces to Murray the completion of the third canto of 
Childe Harold. The productiveness of July is portentous. During 
that month he wrote the Monody on Sheridan., The Dream., Church- 
tlPs Grave, the Sormet to Lake Leman, Could I remount the Rivet 
oftny Years, part of Manfred, Prometheus, the Stanzas to Augusta, 
beginning, 

" My sister ! my sweet sister 1 If a name 
Dearer and purer were, it should be thine ; " 

and the terrible dream of Darkness, which at least in the ghastly 
power of the close, where the survivors meet by the lurid light of a 
dim altar fire, and die of each other's hideousness, surpasses 
Campbell's Last Man.* At Lausanne the poet made a pilgrimage 
to the haunts of Gibbon, broke a sprig from his acacia-tree, and 
carried off some rose leaves from his garden. Though entertaining 
friends, among them Mr. M. G. Lewis and Scrope Davies, he sys- 
tematically shunned " the locust swarm of English tourists," re- 
marking on their obtrusive platitudes ; as when he heard one of 
them at Chamouni inquire, " Did you ever see anything more truly 
rural ? " Ultimately he got tired of the Calvinistic Genevese — 
one of whom is said to have swooned as he entered the room — and 
early in October set out with Hobhouse for Italy. They crossed the 
Simplon, and proceeded by the Lago Maggiore to Milan, admiring 
the pass, but slighting the somewhat hothouse beauties of the Bor- 
romean Islands. From Milan he writes, pronouncing its cathedral 
to be only a little inferior to that of Seville, and delighted with " a 
correspondence, all original and amator}', between Lucretia Borgia 
and Cardinal Bembo." He secured a lock of the golden hair of 
the Pope's daughter, and wished himself a cardinal. 

At Verona, Byron dilates on the amphitheatre, as surpassing 
anything he had seen even in Greece, and on the faith of the peo- 
ple in tile story of Juliet, from whose reputed tomb he sent some 
pieces of granite to Ada and his nieces. In November we find 
liirn settled in Venice, " the greenest isle of his imagination." 
Tliere iie began to form those questionable alliances which are so 
marked a feature of his life, and so frequent a theme in his letters, 
that it is impossible to pass them without notice. The first of his 
temporary idols was Mariana Segati. " the wife of a merchant of 
Venice," for some time his landlord. With this woman, whom he 

* This only appeared in 1831, but Campbell claims to have given Byron in conversa* 
tion the suggestion of the subject. 



BYRON. 



11 



describes as an antelope with oriental eyes, wavy hair, a voice like 
the cooing- of a dove, and the spirit of a Bacchante, he remained 
on terms of intimacy for about eighteen months, during which their 
mutual devotion was only disturbed by some outbursts of jealousy. 
In December the poet took lessons in Armenian, glad to find in 
the study something craggy to break his mind upon. He translated 
into that language a portion of St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians. 
Notes on the carnival, praises of Christabel, instructions about the 
printing of Childe Harold (iii.), protests against, the publication 
under his name of some spurious " domestic poems," and constant 
references, doubtfully domestic, to his Adriatic lady, fill up the 
records of 1816. On February 15, 18x7 he announces to Murray 
the completion of the first sketch of Manfred, and alludes to it in 
a bantering manner as " a kind of poem in dialogue, of a wild met' 
aphysical and inexplicable kind ; " concluding, " I have at least 
rendered it quite itnpossible for the stage, for which my intercourse 
with Drury Lane has given me the greatest contempt." 

About this time Byron seems to have entertained the idea of 
returning to England in the spring, i. e., after a year's absence. 
This design, however, was soon set aside, partly in consequence of 
a slow malarial fever, by which he was prostrated for several 
weeks. On his partial recovery, attributed to his having had 
neither medicine nor doctor, and a determination to live till he 
had " put one or two people out of the world," he started on an ex- 
pedition to Rome. 

His first stage was Arqua ; then Ferrara, where he was inspired, 
by a sight of the Italian poet's prison, with the Lafnejtt of Tasso; 
the next, Florence, where he describes himself as drunk with the 
beauty of the galleries. Among the pictures, he was most im- 
pressed with the mistresses of Raphael and Titian, to whom, along 
with Giorgione, he is always reverential; and he recognised in 
Santa Croce the Westminster Abbey of Italy. Passing through 
Foligno, he reached his destination early in May, and met his old 
friends, Lord Lansdowne and Hobhouse. The poet employed his 
short time at Rome in visiting on horseback the most famous sites 
in the city and neighbourhood — as the Alban Mount, Tivoli, Fras- 
cati, the Falls of Terni, and the Clitumnus — re-casting the crude 
first draft of the third act of Ma7ifred, and sitting for his bust to 
Thorwaldsen. Of this sitting the sculptor afterwards gave some 
account to his compatriot, Hans Andersen : " Byron placed him- 
self opposite to me, but at once began to put on a quite different ex- 
pression from that usual to him. ' Will you not sit still? ' said I. 
' You need not assume that look.' ' That is my expression,' said 
Byron. ' Indeed,' said I ; and I then represented him as I wished. 
When the bust was finished he said, ' It is not at all like me ; my 
expression is more unhappy.' " West, the American, who five 
years later painted his lordship at Leghorn, substantiates the above 
It all-satirical anecdote, by the remark"" He was a liad sitter ; he as- 
sumed a countenance that did not belong to him. as though he were 
tlwnking of a frontispiece for Childe Harold:'' Tho'rwaldsen's 



& 



yS BYRON. 

bust, the first cast of which was sent to Hobhouse, and pronounced 
by Mrs. Leigh to be the best of the numerous likenesses of her 
brother, was often repeated. Professor Brandes, of Copenhagen, 
introduces his striking sketch of the poet by a reference to the 
model, that has its natural place in the museum named from the 
great sculptor whose genius had flung into the clay the features of 
a character so unlike his own. The bust, says the Danish critic, at 
first sight impresses one with an undefinable classic grace ; on closer 
examination, the restlessness of a life is reflected in a brow over 
which clouds seem to hover, but clouds from which we look for 
lightnings. The dominant impression of the whole is that of some 
irresistible power (UnwiderstehUchkeit). Thorwaldsen, at a much 
later date (1829-1833), executed the marble statue, first intended 
for the Abbey, which is now to be seen in the library of Trinity 
College, in evidence that Cambridge is still proud of her most bril- 
liant son. 

Towards the close of the month — after almost fainting at the 
e;jecution by guillotine of three bandits — he professes impatience 
to get back to Mariana, and early in the next we find him estab- 
lished with her near Venice, at the villa of La Mira, where for some 
time he continued to reside. His letters of June refer to the sale 
of Newstead, the mistake of Mrs. Leigh and others in attributing 
to him the Tales of a Landlord, the appearance of Lalla Rookh, 
preparations for Marino Faliero, and the progress of Childe Harold 
(iv). This poem, completed in September, and published early in 
i8i8(with a dedication to Hobhouse, who had supplied most of the 
illustrative notes), first made manifest the range of the poet's 
power. Only another slope of ascent lay between him and the 
pinnacle, over which shines the red star of Cain. Had Lord 
Byron's public career closed when he left England, he would have 
been remembered for a generation as the author of some musical 
minor verses, a clever satire, a journal in verse exhibiting flashes 
of genius, and a series of fascinating romances — also giving 
promise of higher power — which had enjoyed a marvellous popular- 
ity. The third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold \A-a.ctd him on 
another platform, that of the Dii Majores of English verse. These 
cantos are separated from their predecessor, not by a stage, but by 
a i^ulf. Previous to their publication he had only shown how far 
the force of rhapsody could go ; now he struck with his right hand, 
and from the shoulder. Knowledge of life and study of Nature were 
the mainsprings of a growth which the indirect influence of Words- 
worth, and the'^happy Companionship of Shelley, played their part in 
fostering. Faultlessness is seldom a characteristic of impetuous 
verse, never of Byron's ; and even in the later parts of the Childe 
there are careless lines and doubtful images. " Self-exiled Harold, 
wanders forth again," looking "pale and inetresting; " but we are 
soon refreshed by a higher note. No familiarity can detract from 
"Waterloo," which holds its own by Barbour's " Bannockburn " 
and Scott's "Flodden." Sir Walter, referingto the cHmax of the 
opening, and the pathetic lament of the closing lines, generously 



BYRON. 7g 

doubts whether any verses in English surpass them in vigour. 
There follows " The Broken Mirror," extolled by Jeffrey with an 
appreciation of its exuberance of fancy and negligence of diction ; 
and then the masterly sketch of Napolepn, with the implied refer- 
ence to the writer at the end. 

The descriptions in both cantos perpetually rise from a basis of 

rhetoric to a real height of poetry. Byron's " Rhine " flows, like 

the river itself, in a stream of " exulting and abounding" stanzas. 

His "Venice" may be set beside the masterpieces of Ruskin's 

prose. They are together the joint pride of Italy and England. 

xhe tempest in the third canto is in verse a splendid microcosm of 

the favourite, if not the prevailing mood of the writer's mind. In 

spite of manifest flaws, the nine stanzas beginning " It is the hush 

of night," have enough in them to feed a'high reputation. The 

poet's dying day, his sun and moon contending over the Rhoetian 

hill, his Thrasymene, Clitumnus, and Velino, show that his eye 

has grown keener, and his imagery at least more terse, and that he 

can occasionally forget himself in his surroundings. The Drachen- 

fells, Ehrenbreitstein, the Alps, Lake Leman,.pass before us like 

a series of dissolving views. But the stability of the book depends 

on its being a Temple of Fame, as well as a Diorama of Scenery. 

It is no mere versified Guide, because every resting-place in the 

pilgrimage is made interesting by association with illustrious 

memories. Coblentz introduces the tribute to Marceau ; Clarens 

an almost complete review, in five verses, of Rousseau ; Lausanne 

and Ferney the quintessence of criticism on Gibbon and Voltaire. 

A tomb in Arqua suggests Petrarch ; the grass-grown streets of 

Ferrara lead in the lines on Tasso : the white walls of the Etrurian 

Athens bring back Alfieri and Michael Angelo, and the prose bard 

of the hundred tales, and Dante, " buried by the upbraiding shore," 

and 

" The starry Galileo and his woes." 

Byron has made himself so master of the glories and the wrecks 
of Rome, that almost everything else that has been said of them 
seems superfluous. Hawthorne, in his Marble Faiai, comes near- 
est to him ; but Byron's Gladiator and Apollo, if not his Laocoon, 
are unequalled. "The voice of Marius," says Scott, "could not 
sound more deep and solemn among the ruins of Carthage than the 
strains of the pilgrim among the broken shrines and fallen statues 
of her subduer." As the third canto has a fitting close wiLh the 
poet's pathetic remembrance of his daughter, so the fourth is wound 
up with consummate art — the memorable dirge on the Princess 
Charlotte being followed by the address to the sea, which, endur- 
ing unwrinkled through all its ebbs and flows, seems to mock at the 
mutalMlity of human life. 

Manfred, his witch drama, as the author called it, has had a 
special attraction for inquisitive biographers, because it has been 
supposed in some dark manner to reveal the secrets of his prison- 
*!ouse. Its lines have been tortured, Hke the witches of the seven. 



8o BYRON. 

teenth century, to extort from them the meaning of the " all name' 
less hour," and every conceivable horror has been alleged as its 
7notif. On this subject Goethe writes with a humorous simplicity : 
" This singularly intellectual poet has extracted from my Faust the 
strongest nourishment for his hypochondria ; but he has made use 
of the impelling principles for his own purposes. . . . When a bold 
and enterprising young man, he won the affections of a Florentine 
lady. Her husband discovered the amour, and murdered his wife ; 
but the murderer was the same night found dead in the street, and 
there was no one to whom any suspicion could be attached. Lord 
Byron removed from Florence, but these spirits have haunted him 
all his life. This romantic incident explains innumerable allu- 
sions," e. g., 

" I have shed 
Blood, but not hers ; and yet her blood was shed." 

Were it not for the fact that the poet had never seen the city in 
question when he wrote the poem, this explanation would be more 
plausible than most others, for the allusions are all to some lady 
who has been done to death. Gait asserts that the plot turns on a 
tradition of unhallowed necromancy — a human sacrifice, like that of 
Antinous attributed to Hadrian. Byron himself says it has no 
plot; but he kept teasing his questioners with mysterious hints, 
£. g; " It was the Staubbach and the Jungfrau, and something else 
more than Faustus, which made me write Manfred ; " and of one of 
his critics he says to Murray, " It had a better origin than he can 
devise or divine, for the soul of him." In any case most methods 
of reading between its lines would, if similarly applied, convict 
Sophocles, Schiller, and Shelley of incest, Shakspeare of murder, 
Milton of blasphemy, Scott of forgery, Marlowe and Goethe of com- 
pacts with the devil. Byron was no dramatist, but he had wit 
enough to vary at least the circumstances of his projected person- 
ality. The memories of both Fausts — the Elizabethan and the 
German— mingle, in the pages of this piece, with tlie shadows of 
the author's life ; but to these it never gives, nor could be intended 
to give, any substantial form. 

Manfred in a chaos of pictures, suggested by the scenery of 
Lauterbrunnen and Grindehvald, half animated by vague personifi- 
cations and sensational narrative. Like //izra/.'/ and Scott's Mar- 
mion, it just misses being a great poem. The Coliseum is its 
masterpiece of description; the appeal, "Astarte, my beloved, 
speak to me," its nearest approach to pathos. The lonely death of 
the hero makes an effective close to the moral tumult of the preced- 
ing scenes. But the reflections, often striking, are seldom ab- 
solutely fresh : that beginning, 

" The mind, which is immortal, makes itself 
Requital for its good or evil thoughts, 
Is its own origin of ill and end, 
And its own place and time," 



BYJiOA. 8 1 

is transplanted from Milton with as little change as Milton made in 
transplanting it from Marlowe. The author's own favorite passage, 
the invocation to the sun (act iii., sc. 2), has some sublimity, marred 
by lapses. The lyrics scattered through the poem sometimes open 
well, e. g.,— 

" Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains ; 
They crowned him long ago, 
On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, 
With a diadem of snow ; " 

but they cannot sustain themselves like true song-birds, and fall to 
the ground Hke spent rockets. This applies to Byron's lyrics gen- 
erally ; turn to the incantation in the Deformed Transformed : the 
first two lines are in tune — 

" Beautiful shadow of Thetis's boy, 
Who sleeps in the meadow_ whose grass grows o'er Troy." 

Nor Sternhold nor Hopkins has more ruthlessly outraged our ears 
than the next two — 

" From the red earth, like Adam, thy likeness I shape, 
As the Being who made him, whose actions I ape (!) " 

Of his songs : " There be none of Beauty's daughters," " She 
walks in beauty," "Maid of Athens," "I enter thy garden of 
roses," the translation " Sons of the Greeks," and others, have a 
flow and verve that it is pedantry to ignore ; but in general Byron 
was too much of the earth earthy to be a great lyrist. Some of 
the greatest have lived wild lives, but their wings were not weighted 
with the lead of the love of the world. 

The summer and early months of the autumn of 181 7 were spent 
at La Mira, and much of the poet's time was occupied in riding 
along the banks of the Brenta, often in the company of the few con- 
genial Eno;lishmen who came in his way ; others, whom he avoided, 
avenged themselves by retailing stories, none of which were " too 
improbable for the craving appetites of their slander-loving coun- 
t^ymen." In August he received a visit from Mr. Hobhouse, and 
on this occasion drew up the remarkable document afterwards given 
to Mr. M. G. Lewis for circulation in England, which appeared 
in the Academy of October 9, 1869. In this document he says, 
" It has been intimated to me that the persons understood to he 
the legal advisers of Lady Byron have declared their lips to be 
sealed up on the cause of the separation between her and myself. 
If their lips are sealed up they are not sealed up by me, and the 
greatest favour they can confer upon me will be to open them." He 
goes on to state that he repents having consented to the separation 
— will be glad to cancel the deed, or to go before any tribunal to dis- 
cuss the matter in the most public manner; adding, that Mr Hob- 
house (in whose presence he was writing) proposed, on his part, td 



82 B YROA. 

go into court, and ending with a renewed asseveration of his igno- 
rance of the allegations against him, and his inability to understand 
for what purpose they had been kept back, "unless it was to sanc- 
tion the most infamous calumnies by silence." Hobhouse and 
others, during the four succeeding years, ineffectually endeavoured 
to persuade the poet to return to England. Moore and others in- 
sist that Byron's heart was at home when his presence was abroad, 
and that, with all her faults, he loved his country still. Leigh Hunt, 
on the contrary, asserts that he cared nothing for England or its 
affairs. Like many men of genius, Byron was never satisfied with 
what he had at the time. " Romae Tibur amem ventosus Tibure 
Romam." At Seaham he is bored to death, and pants for the ex- 
citement of the clubs ; in London society he longs for a desert or 
island in the Cyclades ; after their separation, he begins to regret 
his wife ; after his exile, his country. " Where," he exclaimed to 
Hobhouse, " is real comfort to be found out of England ? " He 
frequently fell into the mood in which he wrote the verse — 

" Yet I was born where men are proud to be, 
Not without cause : and should I leave behind 
Th' immortal island of the sage and free, 
And seek me out a home by a remoter sea ? " 

But the following, to Murray (June 7, 1819) is equally sincere: 
" Some of the epitaphs at Ferrara pleased me more than the more 
splendid monuments of Bologna ; for instance — 

" ' Martini Luigi 
Implora pace,' 

" * Lucrezia Picini 

Implora eterne quiete. 

Can anything be more full of pathos ? These few words say all 
that can be said or sought ; the dead had had enough of life ; all 
they wanted was rest, and this they implore. There is all the help- 
lessness, and humble hope, and death-like prayer, that can arise 
from the grave — ' implora pace,' I hope, whoever may survive me, 
and shall see me put in the foreigner's burying ground at the Lido, 
within the fortress by the Adriatic, will see these two words, and 
no more, put over me. I trust they won't think of pickling and 
bringing me home to Clod, or Blunderbuss Hall. I am sure my 
bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the 
earth of that country." Hunt's view is, in this as in other subtle 
respects, nearer the truth than Moore's ; for with all of Byron's in- 
sight into Italian vice, he hated more the master vice of England — 
hypocrisy; and much of his greatest, and in a sense latest, because 
unfinished work, is the severest, as it might be the wholesomest, 
satire ever directed against a great nation since the days of Juvenal 
and Tacitus. 

In September (1817) Byron entered into negotiations, afterwards 



BYRON. 83 

completed, for renting a country house among the Euganean hills 
near Este, from Mr. Hoppner, the English Consul at Venice, who 
bears frequent testimony to his kindness and courtesy. In October 
we find him settled for the winter in Venice, where he first occu- 
pied his old quarters in the Spezieria, and afterwards hired one of 
tlie palaces of the Countess Mocenigo on the Grand Canal. Se- 
tweea this mansion, the cottage at Este, and the villa of La Mira, 
he divided his time for the next two years. During the earlier part 
of iiis Venetian career he had continued to frequent the salon of 
the Countess Albrizzi, where he met with people of both sexes of 
some rank and standing who appreciated his genius, though some 
among them fell into absurd mistakes. A gentleman of the com- 
panv informing the hostess, in answer to some inquiry regarding 
Canova's busts, that Washington, the American President, was 
shot in a duel by Burke, " What in the name of folly are youtliink- 
ing of ? " said Byron, perceiving that the speaker was confounding 
Washington with Hamilton, and Burke with Burr. He atterwards 
tranferred himself to the rival coterie of the Countess Benzoni, and 
gave himself up with little reserve to the intrigues which "cast dis- 
credit on this portion of his life. Nothing is so conducive to dis- 
sipation as despair, and Byron had begun to regard the Sea-Cybele 
as a Sea-Sodom— when he wrote, "To watch a city die daily, as 
she does, is a sad contemplation. I sought to distract my mind 
from a sense of her desolation and my own solitude, by plunging 
into a vortex that was anything but pleasure." In any case, he for- 
sook the " Dame," and by what his biographer calls a "descent in 
the scale of refinement for which nothing but the wayward state of 
his mind can account," sought the companions of his leisure hours 
among the wearers of the " fazzioli." The carnivals of the years 1818, 
1819, mark the height of his excesses. Early in the former, Mari- 
ana Segati fell out of favour, owing to Byron's having detected her 
in selling the jewels he had given as presents, and so being led to 
suspect a large mercenary element in her devotion. To her suc- 
ceeded Margarita Cogni, the wife of a baker, who proved as accom- 
modating as his predecessor, the linen-draper. This woman was 
decidedly a character, and Seiior Castelar has almost elevated her 
into a heroine. A handsome virago, with brown shoulders and 
black hair, endowed with the strength of an Amazon, "a face like 
P'austina's, and the figure of a Juno — tall and energetic as a pyth- 
oness," she quartered herself for twelve months in the palace as 
" Donna di governo," and drove the servants about without let 
or hindrance. Unable to read or write, she intercepted his lord- 
ship's letters to little purpose ; but she had great natural business 
talents, reduced by one half the expenses of his household, kept 
everything in good order, and, when her violence roused his wrath, 
turned it off with some refeidy retort or witticism, ^he was very 
devout, and would cross herself three times at the Angelus. One 
instance, of a different kind of devotion, from Byron's own account, 
is sufficiently graphic; " In the autumn one day, going to the Lido 
with my gondoliers, we were overtaken by a heavy squall, and the 



84 



B yron: 



gondola put in peril, hats blown away, boat filling, oar lost, tumbling 
sea, thunder, rain in torrents, and wind unceasing. On our return, 
after a tight struggle, I found her on the open steps of the Moce- 
nigo Palace on the Grand Canal, with her great black eyes flashing 
through her tears, and the long dark hair which was streaming, 
drenched wiih rain, over her brows, ^'he was perfectly exposed 
to the storm ; and the wind blowing her dress about her thin figure, 
and the lightning flashing round her, made her look like Medea 
alighted from her chariot, or the Sibyl of the tempest that was roll- 
ing round her, the only Hving thing within hail at that moment ex- 
cept ourselves. On seeing me safe, she did not wait to greet me, 
as might have been expected; but, calling out to me, 'Ah lean' 
della Madonna, xe esto il tempo per andar' al' Lido," ran into the 
house, and solaced herself with scolding the boatmen for not fore- 
seeing the 'temporale.' Her joy at seeing me again was moder- 
ately mixed with ferocity, and gave me the idea of a tigress over her 
recovered cubs." 

Some months after, she became ungovernable — threw plates 
about, and snatched caps from the heads of other women who 
looked at her lord in public places. Byron told her she must go 
home ; whereupon she proceeded to break glass, and threaten 
" knives, poison, fire ; " and on his caUinghis boatmen to get ready 
the gondola, threw herself in the dark night into the canal. She 
was rescued, and in a few days finally dismissed ; after which he 
saw her only twice, at the theatre. Her whole picture is more like 
that of Theroigne de Mericourt than that of Raphael's Fornarina, 
whose name she received. 

Other stories, of course, gathered round this strange life — per- 
sonal encounters, aquatic feats, and all maimer of romantic and 
impossilile episodes ; their basis being that Byron on one occasion 
thrashed, on another challenged, a man who tried to cheat him, was a 
frequent rider, and a constant swimmer, so that he came to be called 
" the English fish," " water-spaniel," " sea-devil," &c. One of 
the boatmen is reported to have said, " He is a good gondolier, 
spoilt by being a poet and a lord ; " and in answer to a traveller's 
inquiry, "Where does he get his poetry?" "He dives for it." 
His habits, as regards eating, seem to have been generally abstemi- 
ous ; but he drank a pint of gin and water over his verses at night, 
aud then took claret and soda in the morning. 

Riotous living may have helped to curtail Byron's life, but it 
does not seem to have seriously impaired his powers. Among 
these adverse surroundings of the " court of Circe," he threw off 
Beppo, Mazeppa, and the early books of Don yuan. The first 
canto of the last was written in November, 1818; the second in 
January. 1819 ; the third and fourth towards the close of the same 
year. Beppo, its brilHant prelude, sparkles like a draught of cham- 
pagne. This "Venetian story," or sketch, in which the author 
broke ground on his true satiric field — the satire of social life — 
and first adopted the measure avowedly suggested by Frere's 
Whistlecrafty was drafted in October, 181 7, and appeared in May, 



BYRON. 85 

1818. It aims at comparatively little, but is perfectly successful 
in its aim, and unsurpassed for the incisiveness of its side 
strokes, and the courtly ease of a manner that never degenerates 
into mannerism. In Mazeppa the poet reverts to his earlier 
style, and that of Scott ; the description of the headlong ride 
hurries us along with a breathless expectancy that gives it a 
conspicuous place among his minor efforts. The passage about 
the howling of the wolves, and the fever faint of the victim, is as 
graphic as anything in Burns — 

" The skies spun like a mighty wheel, 
I saw the trees like drunkards reel." 

In the May or June of 1818 Byron's little daughter, Allegra, 
had been sent from England, under the care of a Swiss nurse too 
young to undertake her management in such trying circumstances, 
and after four months of anxiety he placed her in charge of Mrs. 
Hoppner. In the course of this and the next year there are fre- 
quent allusions to the child, all, save one which records a mere 
affectation of indifference, full of affectionate solicitude. In June, 

1819, he writes, "Her temper and her ways, Mr. Hoppner says, 
are like mine, as well as her features ; she will make, in that case, 
a manageable j-oung lady." Later he talks of her as "flourishing 
like a pomegranate blossom." In March, 1820, we have another 
reference. " Allegra is prettier, I think, but as obstinate as a 
mule, and as ravenous as a vulture ; health good to judge by the 
complexion, temper tolerable but for vanity and pertinacity. She 
thinks herself handsome, and will do as she pleases." In May he 
refers to having received a letter from h^ mother, but gives no 
details. In the following year, with the approval of the Shelleys, 
then at Pisa, he placed her for education in the convent of Cavalli 
Bagni in the Romagna. " I have," he writes to Hoppner, who had 
thought of having her boarded in Switzerland, " neither spared 
care, kindness, nor expense, since the child was sent to me. The 
people may say what they please. I must content myself with not 
deserving,'in this instance, that they should speak ill. The place 
is a country town, in a good air, and less liable to' objections of 
every kind. It has always appeared to me that the moral defect 
in Italy does «^/ proceed from a f^«7/^«/?/<3:/ education ; because, 
to my certain knowledge, they come out of their convents innocent, 
even to ignorance of moral evil ; but to the state of society info 
which they are directly plunged on coming out of it. It is like 
educating an infant on a mountain top, and then taking him to the 
sea and throwing him into it, and desiring him to swim." Else- 
where he says, " I by no means intend to give a natural child an 
English education, because, with the disadvantages of her birth, 
her after settlement would be doubly difficult. Abroad, with a 
fair foreign education, and a portion of 5000/. or 6000/. (his will 
leaving her 5000/., on condition that she should not marry an Eng- 
lishman, is here explained and justified), she might, and may, 



86 BYRON. 

marry very respectably. In England such a dowry would be a piT« 
tance, while elsewhere it is a fortune. It is, besides, my wish that 
she should be a Roman Catholic, which I look upon as the best 
religion, as it is assuredly the oldest of the various branches of 
Christianity." It only remains to add that, when he heard that 
the child had fallen ill of fever in 1822, Byron was almost speech- 
less with agitation, and, on the news of her death, which took place 
April 22nd, he seemed at first utterly prostrated. Next day he said, 
" Allegra is dead ; she is more fortunate than we. It is God's will ; 
let us mention it no more." Her remains rest beneath the elm- 
tree at Harrow which her father used to haunt in boyhood, with 
the date of birth and death, and the verse — 

" I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me," 

The most interesting of the visits paid to Byron during the period 
of his life at Venice was that of Shelley, who, leaving bis wife and 
children at Bagni di Lucca, came to see him in August, 1818. He 
arrived late, in the midst of thunder-storm ; and next day tliey 
sailed to the Lido, and rode together along the sands. The attitude 
of the two poets towards each other is curious ; the comparatively 
shrewd man of the world often relied on the idealist for guidance and 
help in practical matters, admired his courage and independence, 
spoke of him invariably as the best of men, but never paid a suffi- 
ciently warm tribute in public to his work. Shelley, on the other 
hand, certainly the most modest of great poets, contemplates Byron 
in the fixed attitude of a literary worshipper. 

The introduction to 'Jiiliav and Maddalo, ^\x&c\\'j suggested 
by this visit, under the slight veil of a change in the name, gives a 
summary of the view of his friend's character which he continued 
to entertain. " He is a person of the most consummate genius, 
and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of be- 
coming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weak- 
ness to be proud ; he derives, from a comparison of his own 
extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, 
an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life. His 
passions and Ws powers are incomparably greater than those of 
other men ; and instead of the latter having been employed in 
curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength ; " 
but " in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and 
unassuming. He is cheerful, frank, and witty. His more serious 
conversation is a sort of intoxication ; men are held by it as by a 
spell." 

Subsequently to this visit Byron lent the villa at Este to his 
friend, and during the autumn weeks of their residence there were 
written the lines among the Euganean hills, where, in the same 
strain of reverence, Shelley refers to the " tempest-cleaving swan of 
Albion," to the " music flung o'er a mighty thunder-fit," and to th« 
sun-like soul destined to immortalise his ocean refuge — 



BYRON. 87 

"As the ghost of Homer clings 
Round Scamander's wasting springs, 
As divin'st Shakspeare's might ' 

Fills Avon and the world with light." 

" The sun," he says, at a later date, " has extinguished the 
glowworm ; " and again, " I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as 
well I may ; and there is no other with whom it is worth con- 
tending." 

Shelley was, in the main, not only an exquisite but a trustworthy 
critic ; and no man was more absolutely above being influenced by 
the fanfaronade of rank or the din of popularity. These criticisms 
are therefore not to be lightly set aside, nor are they unintelligible. 
Perhaps those admirers of the clearer and more consistent nature, 
who exalt him to the rank of a greater poet, are misled by the 
amiable love of one of the purest characters in the history of our 
literature. There is at least no difficulty in understanding why he 
should have been, as it were, concussed by Byron's greater mas- 
siveness and energy into a sense — easy to a man half bard, half 
saint — of inferiority. Similarly, most of the estimates — many 
already reversed, others reversible — by the men of that age, of 
each other, can be explained. We can see how it was that Shelley 
overestimated both the character and the powers of Hunt ; and 
Byron depreciated Keats, and was ultimately repelled by Words- 
worth, and held out his hand to meet the manly grasp of Scott. 
The one enigma of their criticism is the respect that they joined 
in paying to the witty, genial, shallow, worldly, musical Tom Moore. 

This favourite of fortune and the minor muses, in the course 
of a short tour through the north of Italy in the autumn of 1819, 
found his noble friend on the 8th of October at La Mira, went with 
hipi on a sight-seeing expedition to Venice, and passed five or six 
days in his company. Of this visit he has recorded his impres- 
sions, some of which relate to his host's personal appearance, 
others to his habits and leading incidents of his life. Byron " had 
grown fatter, both in person and face, and the latter had suffered 
most by the change, having lost by the enlargement of the features, 
some of that refined and spirituaHsed look that had in other times 
distinguished it ; but although less romantic, he appeared more 
humorous." They renewed their recollections of the old days and 
nights in London, and compared them with later experiences of 
Bores and Blues, in a manner which threatened to put to flight 
the historical and poetical associations naturally awakened by 
the City of the Sea. Byron had a rooted dislike to any approach 
to fine talk in the ordinary intercourse of hfe ; and when his 
companion began to rhapsodise on the rosy hue of the Italian 
sunsets, he interrupted him with, " Come, d — n it, Tom, doti't 
be poetical." He insisted on Moore, who sighed after what 
he imagined would be the greater comforts of an hotel, taking 
up his quarters in his palace ; and as they were groping their 
way through the somewhat dingy entrance, cried out, "Keep clear 



88 BYRON. 

of the dog ! " and a few paces farther, " Take caro, or the monkey 
will fly at you ! " an incident recalling the old vagaries of the 
menagerie at Newstead. The biographer's reminiscences mainly 
dwell on his lordship's changing moods and tempers and gym- 
nastic exercises, his terror of interviewing strangers, his imper- 
fect appreciation of art, his preference of fish to flesh, his al- 
most parsimonious economy in small matters, mingled with allu- 
sions to his domestic calamities, and frequent expressions of a 
growing distaste to Venetian society. On leaving the city, Moore 
passed a second afternoon at La Mira, had a glimpse of Allegra, 
and the first intimation of the existence of the notorious Memoirs. 
"A short time after dinner Byron left the room, and returned 
carrying in his hand a white leather bag. ' Look here,' he said, 
holding it up ; ' this would be worth something to Murray, though 
you., I dare say, would not give sixpence for it.' 'What is it ? ' I 
asked. ' My life and adventures,' he answered. ' It is not a thing,' 
he answered, ' that can be published during my lifetime, but you 
may have it if you like. There, do whatever you please with it.' 
In taking the bag, and thanking him most warmly, I added, * This 
will make a nice legacy for my little Tom, who shall astonish the 
latter days of the nineteenth century with it.'"* Shortly after, 
Moore for the last time bade his friend farewell, taking with him 
from Madame Guiccioli, who did the honours of the house, an in- 
troduction to her brother, Count Gamba, at Rome. " Theresa 
Guiccioli," says Castelar, "appears like a star on the stormy hori- 
zon of the poet's life." A young Romagnese, the daughter of a 
nobleman of Ravenna, of good descent but limited means, she had 
been educated in a convent, and married in her nineteenth year to 
a rich widower of sixty, in early life a friend of Alfieri, and noted 
as the patron of the National Theatre. This beautiful blonde, of 
pleasing manners, graceful presence, and a strong vein of senti- 
ment, fostered by the reading of Chateaubriand, met Byron for the 
first time casually when she came in her bridal dress to one of the 
Albrizzi reunions ; but she was only introduced to him early in the 
April of the following year, at the house of the Countess Benzoni. 
" Suddenly the young Italian found herself inspired with a passion 
of v/hich till that moment her mind could not have formed the 
least idea ; she had thought of love but as an amusement, and now 
became its slave." Byron, on the other hand, gave what remained 
of a heart never alienated from her by any other mistress. Till 
the middle of the month they met every day ; and when the hus- 
band took her back to Ravenna she despatched to her idol a series 
of impassioned letters, declaring her resolution to mould her life in 
accordance with his wishes. Towards the end of May she had 

* In December, j82o, Byron sent several more sheets of memoranda from Ravenna; 
and in the following yearsuegested an arrangement by which Murray paid over to Moore, 
who was then in difficulties, 2000/. for the right of publishing the -w-hole, under the condi-. 
tion, among others, that Lady Byron should see them, and have the right of reply to 
anything that might seem to her objectionable. She on her part declined to have anything 
to do with them. When the Memoirs were destroyed, Moore paid back the 2000/., buf 
obtained four thousand guineas for editing the Life and Corrpspondence. 



BYRON. 89 

prepared her relatives to receive Byron as a visitor. He started 
in answer to the summons, writing on his way the beautiful stanzas 
to the Po, beginning— 

" River that rollest by the ancient walls 
Where dwells the lady of my love." 

Again passing through Ferrara, and visiting Bologna, he left 
the latter on the 8th, and on his arrival at his destination found the 
Countess dangerously ill ; but his presence, and the attentions of 
the famous Venetian doctor Aglietti, who was sent for by his ad- 
vice, restored her. The Count seems to have been proud of his 
guest. " I can't make him out at all," Byron writes ; " he visits me 
frequently, and takes me out (like Whittington the Lord Ma3'or) 
in a coach and six horses. The fact appears to be, that he is com- 
pletely governed by her — and, for that matter, so am I." Later he 
speaks of having got his horses from Venice, and riding or driving 
daily in the scenery reproduced in the third canto of Don Juan: — 

" Sweet hour of twilight ! in the solitude 
Of the pine forest, and the silent shore 
Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood." 

On Theresa's recovery, in dread of a possible separation, he 
proposed to fly with her to America, to the Alps, to " some unsus- 
pected isle in the far seas ; " and she suggested the idea of feigning 
death, like Juliet, and rising from the tomb. Neither expedient 
was called for. When the Count went to Bologna, in August, with 
his wife, Lord Byron was allowed to follow; and after consoling 
himself during an excursion which the married pair made to their 
estate, by hovering about her empty rooms and "writing in her 
books, he established himself, on the Count's return to his head- 
quarters, with her and Allegra at Bologna. Meanwhile, Byron 
had written The Prophecy of Dante, and in August the prose let- 
ter, To the Editor of the British Review, on the charge of bribery 
in Do7i Jua7t. Than this inimitable epistle no more laughter- 
compelling composition exists. About the same time, we hear of 
his leaving the theatre in a convulsion of tears, occasioned by the 
representation of Alfieri's Mirra. 

He left Bologna with the Countess on the 15th of September, 
when they visited the Euganean hills and Arqua, and wrote their 
names together in the Pilgrim's Book. On arriving at Venice, the 
physicians recommending Madame Guiccioli to country air, they 
settled, still by her husband's consent, for the autumn at La Mira, 
where Moore and others found them domesticated. At the begin- 
ning of November the poet was prostrated by an attack of tertian 
fever. In some of his hours of delirium he dictated to his careful 
nurses, Fletcher and the Countess, a number of verses, which she 
assures us were correct and sensible. He attributes his restora- 
tion to cold water and the absence of doctors; but, ere his com- 
plete recovery, Count Guiccioli had suddenly appeared on the 



go BYRON. 

scene, and run away with his own wife. The lovers had for a time 
not only to acquiesce in the separation, but to agree to cease their 
correspondence. In December Byron, in a fit of spleen, had packed 
up his belongings, with a view to return to England. " He was," 
we are told, " ready dressed for the journey, his boxes on board 
the gondola, his gloves and cap on, and even his little cane in his 
hand, when my lord declares that if it should strike one — which it 
did — before everything was in order, he would not go that day. It 
is evident he had not the heart to go. Next day he heard that 
Madame Guiccioli was again seriously ill, received and accepted 
the renewed invitation which bound him to her and to the south. 
He left Venice for the last time almost by stealth, rushed along the 
familiar roads, and was welcomed at Ravenna. 



BYRON. 



9» 



CHAPTER VIII. 
[1820-1821.] 

RAVENNA. — DRAMAS. — CAIN. — VISION OF JUDGMENT. 

Byron's life at Ravenna was during the first months compara- 
tively calm ; nevertheless, he mingled in society, took part in the Car- 
nival, and was received at the parties of the Legate. " I may stay," 
he writes in January, 1820, " a day — a week — a year — all my life." 
Meanwhile, he imported his movables from Venice, hired a suite 
of rooms in the Guiccioli palace, executed his marvellously close 
translation of Pulci's Morgante Maggiorc, wrote his version of 
the story of Francesca of Rimini, and received visits from his old 
friend Bankes and from Sir Humphry Davy. At this time he was 
accustomed to ride about armed to the teeth, apprehending a pos- 
sible attack from assassins on the part of Count Guiccioli. In April 
his letters refer to the insurrectionary movements then beginning 
against the Holy Alliance. "We are on the verge of a row here. 
Last night they have over-written all the city walls with ' Up with 
the Republic!' and 'Death to the Pope!' The police have 
been searching for the subscribers,' but have, caught none as 
yet. The other day they confiscated the whole translation of 
the fourth cantos of Childe Hat^old, and have prosecuted the 
translator." In July a Papal decree of separation between the 
Countess and her husband was obtained, on condition of the 
latter paying from his large income a pittance to the lady of 
200/. a year, and her undertaking to live in her father's house 
— an engagement which was, first in the spirit, and subsequently 
in the letter, violated. For a time, however, she retired to 
a villa about fifteen miles from Ravenna, where she was visited by 
Byron at comparativelv rare intervals. By the end of July he had 
finished Mari7io Faliero, and ere the close of the year the fifth 
canto of Don Juatt. In September he says to Murray, " I am in a 
fierce humour at not having Scott's Monastery. No more Keats,* 

* In a note on a, similar passage, bearing the date November 12, 1S21, he, however, 
confesses : '• My indignation at Mr. Keats' depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me 
to do justice to his own genius, which malgre all the fantastic fopperies of his style was 
undoubtedly of great promise. His fragment of Hyperion seems actually inspired by th# 
Titans, and is as sublime as ^schylus. He is a loss to our literature." 



g2 BYRON. 

I entreat. There is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the mani- 
kin. I don't feel inclined to care further about /?£>« Jtian. What 
do you think a very pretty Italian lady said to me the other day, 
when I remarked that 'it would live longer than Childe Harold?^ 
'- Ah ! but I would rather have the fame of Childe Harold for three 
years than an immortality of D. J.' " This is to-day the common 
female judgment; it is known to have been La Guiccioli's, as well 
as Mrs. Leigh's, and by their joint persuasion Byron was for a 
season induced to lay aside " that horrid, wearisome Don." About 
ihis time he wrote the memorable reply to the remarks on that 
poem in Blackwood's Magazine, where he enters on a defence of 
his life, attacks the Lakers, and champions Pope against the new 
school of poetry, lamenting that his own practice did not square 
with his precept ; and adding, "We are all wrong, except Rogers, 
Crabbe, and Campbell." 

In November he refers to reports of his letters being opened 
by the Austrian officials, and the unpleasant things the Huns, as 
he calls them, are likely to find therein. Early in the next month 
he tells Moore that the commandant of their troops, a brave officer, 
but obnoxious to the people, had been found lying at his door, with 
five slugs in him, and, bleeding inwardly, had died in the palace, 
where he had been brought to be nursed. 

This incident is versified in Don Juan, v. 33-39, with anatom- 
ical minuteness of detail. After trying in vain to wrench an an- 
swer out of death, the poet ends in his accustomed strain — 

" But it was all a mystery. Here we are, 
And there we go : — but where ? Five bits of lead — 
Or three, or two, or one — send very far ! " 

Assassination has sometimes been the prelude to revolution, 
but it may be questioned if it has ever promoted the cause of lib- 
erty. Most frequently it hag served as a pretext for reaction, or a 
red signal. In this instance — as afterwards in 1848 — overt acts of 
violence made the powers of despotism more alert, and conduced, 
with the half-hearted action of their adversaries, to the suppression 
of the rising of 1820-21. Byron's sympathy with the movement 
seems to have been stimulated by his new associations. Theresa's 
i-rother, Count Pietro, an enthusiastic young soldier, having re- 
turned from Rome and Naples, surmounting a prejudice not 
wholly unnatural, became attached to him, and they entered into a 
partnership in behalf of what — adopting a phrase often flaunted in 
opposite camps — they called constitutional principles. Finally, the 
poet so committed himself to the party of insurrection that, though 
his nationality secured him from direct attack, his movements were 
necessarily affected by the fiasco. In July the Gambas were ban- 
ished from the Romagna, Pietro being actually carried by force 
over the frontier; and, according to the articles of her separation, 
the Countess had to follow them to Florence. Byron lingered for 
some months, partly from a spirit of defiance, and partly from liis 



B YRON. f)3 

affection towards a place where he had enlisted the regards of nu- 
merous beneficiaries. The Gambas were for some time bent on 
misfrating to Switzerland ; but the poet, after first acquiescing, 
subsequently conceived a violent repugnance to the idea, and early 
in x\ugast wrote to Shelley, earnestly requesting his presence, aid, 
and counsel. Shelley at once complied, and, entering into a cor- 
respondence with Madame Guiccioii, succeeded in inducing her 
relatives to abandon their transmontane plans, and agree to take 
UD their headquarters at Pisa. This incident gave rise to a series 
of interesting letters, in which the younger poet gives a vivid and 
Sfenerous account of the surroundin<rs and condition of his friend. 
On the 2nd of August he writes from Ravenna: "I arrived last 
night at ten o'clock, and sat up talking with Lord B. till five this 
morning. He was delighted to see me. He has, in fact, com- 
pletely recovered his health, and lives a life totally the reverse of 
that Avhich he led at Venice. . . . Poor fellow ! he is now quite 
well, and immersed in politics and literature. We talked a great 
deal of poetry and such matters last night, and, as usual, differed, 
I think, more than ever. He affects to patronise a system of crit- 
icism fit only for the production of mediocrity ; and, although all his 
finer poems and passages have been produced in defiance of this 
system, yet I recognise the pernicious effects of it in the Dos:e of 
Venice." Again, on the 15th: "Lord B. is greatly improved in 
every respect — in genius, in temper, in moral views, in health and 
happiness. His connection with La Guiccioii has been an inesti- 
mable benefit to him. He lives in considerable splendour, but 
within his income, which is now about 4000/. a year, 1000/. of which 
he devotes to purposes of charity. Switzerland is little fitted for 
him ; the gossip and the cabals of those Anglicised coteries would 
torment him as they did before. Ravenna is a miserable place. 
He would in every respect be better among the Tuscans. He has 
read to me one of the unpublished cantos of Don yuan. Jt sets 
him not only above, but far above, all the poets of the day. Every 
word has the stamp of immortality. ... I have spoken to him of 
Hunt, but not with a direct view of demanding a contribution. 
I am sure, if I asked, it would not be refused ; yet there is some- 
thing in me that makes it impossible. Lord B. and I are excellent 
friends; and were I reduced to poverty, or were I a writer v/ho 
had no claim to a higher position than I possess, I would freely 
ask him any favour. Such is not now the case." Later, after 
stating that Byron had decided upon Tuscany, he says, in reference 
to La Guiccioii : " At the conclusion of a letter, full of all the fine 
things she says she has heard of me, is this request, which I tran- 
scribe : ' Signore, la vostra bontk mi fa ardita di chiedervi un fa- 
vore, me lo accordarete voi ? Nofi partite da Raveniia senza 
milord.^ Of course, being now by all the laws of knighthood cap- 
tive to a lady's request, I shall only be at liberty on my parole un- 
til Lord Byron is settled at Pisa." 

Shelley took his leave, after a visit of ten days' duration, about 
the 17th or rSth of April. In a letter, dated August 26, he men. 



p4 BYRON. 

tions having secured for his lordship the Palazzo Lanfranchi, an 
old spacious building on the Lung' Arno, once the family residence 
of the destroyers of Ugolino, and still said to be haunted by their 
ghosts. Towards the close of October, he says they have been 
expecting him any day these six weeks. Byron, however, did not 
leave till the morning of the 29th. On his road, there occurred at 
Imola the accidental meeting with Lord Clare. Clare — who on 
this occasion merely crossed his fricHd's path on his way to Rome 
— at a later date came on purpose from Geneva before returning 
to England to visit the poet, who, then at Leghorn, recorded in a 
letter to Moore his sense of this proof of old affection undecayed. 
At Bologna — his next stage — he met Rogers by appointment, and 
the latter has preserved his memory of the event in well-known 
lines. Together they revisited Florence and its galleries, where 
they were distracted by the crowds of sight-seeing visitors. Byron 
must have reached Pisa not later than the 2nd of November (1821), 
for his first letter from there bears the date of the 3rd. 

The later months of the poet's hfe at Ravenna were marked by 
intense literary activity. Over a great part of the year was spread 
the controversy with Bowles about Pope, i. e., between the extremes 
of Art against Nature, and Nature against Art. It was a contro- 
versy for the most part free from personal animus, and on Byron's 
part the genuine expression of a reaction against a reaction. To 
this year belong the greater number of the poet's Historical 
Dramas. What was said of these at the time by Jeffrey, Heber, 
and others, was said with justice ; it is seldom that the criticism of 
our day finds so little to reverse in that of sixty years ago. 

The author, having shown himself capable of being pathetic, 
sarcastic, sentimental, comical, and sublime, we would be tempted 
to think that he had written these plays to show, what no one be- 
fore suspected, that he could also be dull, were it not for his own 
exorbitant estimation of them. Lord Byron had few of the powers 
of a great dramatist; he had little architectural imagination, or ca- 
pacity to conceive and build up a whole. His works are mainly 
masses of fine, splendid, or humorous writing, heaped together; 
the parts are seldom forged into one, or connected by any indis- 
soluble link. His so-called Dramas are only poems divided into 
chapters. Further, he had little of what Mr. Ruskin calls Pene- 
trative Imagination. So it has been plausibly said that he made 
his men after his own image, his women after his own heart. The 
former are, indeed, rather types of what he wished to be than what 
he was. They are better,' and worse, than himself. They have 
stronger wills, more definite purposes, but less genial and less ver- 
satile natures. But it remains true, that when he tried to represent 
a character totally different from himself, the result is either unreal 
or uninteresting. Mdriiw Faliero, begun April, finished July, 1S20, 
and prefixed by a humorous dedication to Gbethe — which was, 
however, suppressed — was brought on the stage of Drury Lane 
Theatre early in 1821 badly mangled, appointed, and acted — and 
damned. 



B YRON. 



95 



Byron seems to have been sincere in saying he did not intend 
any of his plays to be represented. We are more inclined to accuse 
him of self-deception when he asserts that he did not mean them 
to be popular; but he took sure means to prevent them from being 
so. Marino Faliero, in particular, was pronounced by Dr. John 
Watkins — old Grobius himself — " to be the dullest of dull plays ;" 
and even the warmest admirers of the poet had to confess that the 
style was cumbrous. The story may be true, but it is none the less 
unnatural. The characters are comparatively commonplace, the 
women especially being mere shadows; the motion is slow; and 
the inevitable passages of fine writing are, as the extolled soliloquy 
of Lioni, rather rhetorical than imaginative. The speeches of the 
Doge are solemn, but prolix, if not ostentatious, and — perhaps the 
vital defect — his cause fails to enlist our sympathies. Artistically, 
this play was Byron's most elaborate attempt to revive the unities 
and other restrictions of the severe style, which, when he wrote, 
had been "vanquished in literature." " I am persuaded," he writes 
in the preface, '' that a great tragedy is not to be produced by fol- 
lowing the old dramatists, who are full of faults, but by producing 
regular dramas like the Greeks." He forgets that the statement 
in the mouth of a Greek dramatist that his play was not intended 
for the stage, would have been a confession of failure ; and that 
Aristotle had admitted that even the Deity could not make the 
Past present. The ethical motives of Faliero are, first, the cry for 
vengeance — the feeling of affronted or unsatiated pride — that runs 
through so much of the author's writing; and, second, the enthu- 
siasm for public ends, which was beginning to possess him. The 
following lines have been pointed out as embodying some of Byron's 
spirit of protest against the mere selfish "greasy domesticity" of 
the Georgian era : — 



"to* 



I. Ber. " Such ties are not 

For those who are called to the high destinies 
Which purify corrupted commonwealths : 
We must forget all feelings save the one, 
We must resigh all passions save our purpose, 
We must behold no object save our country, 
And only look on death as beautiful 
So that the sacrifice ascend to heaven, 
And draw down freedom on her evermore. 

Cal. "But if we fail—.? 

I. Ber. " They never fail who die 

In a great cause : the block may soak their gore; 
Their heads may sodden in the sun ; their limbs 
Be strung to city gates and castle walls, 
But still their spirit walks abroad " 

— a passage which, after his wont, he spoils by platitudes about the 
precisian Brutus, who certainly did not give Rome liberty. 

Byron's other Venetian Drama, the Two Foscari, composed 
at Ravenna, between the nth of June and the loth of July, 1821, 



96 



BYRON. 



and published in the following December, is another record of 
the same failure and the same mortification, due to the same 
causes. In this play, as Jeffrey points out. the preservation of the 
unities had a still more disastrous effect. The author's determina- 
tion to avoid rant did not hinder his frequently adopting an inflated 
style ; while professing to follow the ancient rules, he forgets the 
warning of Horace so far as to permit the groans of the tortured 
Foscari to be heard on the stage. The declamations of Marina 
produce no effect on the action, and the vindictiveness o^ Loridano, 
though effectively pointed in the closing words, " He has paid me," 
is not rendered interesting, either by a well established injury, or 
by any trace of lago's subtle genius. 

Jn the same volume appeared Sardanapalus, written in the pre- 
vious May, and dedicated to Goethe. In this play, which marks the 
author's last reversion to the East, we are more arrested by the 
majesty of the theme — 

" Thirteen hundred years 
Of empire ending like a shepherd's tale " — 

by the grandeur of some cf the passages, and by the development 
of the chief character, made more vivid by its being distinctly auto- 
biographical. Sardanapalus himself is Harold, raised " high on a 
throne," and rousing himself at the close from a life of effeminate 
lethargy. Myrrha has been often identified with La Guiccioli, and 
the hero's relation to his Queen Zarina compared with that of the 
poet to his wife ; but in his portrait of the former the author's de- 
fective capacity to represent national character is manifest : Myrrha 
is only another Gulnare, Medora, or Zuleika. In the domestic 
play of Werner — completed at Pisa in January, 1822, and published 
in November — there is no merit either of plan or execution ; for 
the plot is taken, with little change, from " The German's Tale," 
written by Harriet Lee, and the treatment is throughout prosaic. 
Byron was never a master of blank verse ; but Werner, his sole 
success on the modern British stage, is wytten in a style fairly par- 
odied by Campbell, when he cut part of the author's preface into 
lines, and pronounced them as good as any in the play. 

The Deformed Transformed, another adaptation, suggested 
by a forgotten novel called The Three Brothers, with reminiscen- 
ces of Faust, and possibly of Scott's Black Dwarf, was begun at 
Pisa in 1821, but not published till January, 1824. This fragment 
ov/es its interest to the bitter infusion of personal feeling in the 
first scene, and its occasional charm to the march of some of the 
lines, especially those describing the Bourbon's advance on Rome ; 
but the effect of the magical element is killed by previous paral- 
lels, while the story is chaotic and absurd. The Deformed Trans- 
formed hfa.rs, somewhat the same relation to Manfred, as Heaven 
and Ea7th — an occasionally graphic dream of the world before 
the Deluge, written October, 7821, and issued about the same 
time as Moore's Loves of the Angels, on a similar theme — does to 



B YHOA'. 



97 



Caift. The last named, begun in July, and finished at Ravenna in 
September, is the author's highest contribution to the metaphys- 
ical poetry of the century. In Cain Byron grapples with the per- 
plexities of a belief which he never either accepted or rejected, 
and with the yet deeper problems of life and death, of good and 
ill. In dealing with these, his position is not that of one justify- 
ing the ways of God to man — though he somewhat disingenuously 
appeals to Milton in his defence — nor that of the definite antagon- 
ism of Queeji Mab. The distinction in this respect between Byron 
and Shelley cannot be over-emphasised. The latter had a firm faith 
other than that commonly called Christian. The former was, in 
the proper sense of the word, a sceptic, beset with doubts, and 
seeking for a solution which he never found, shifting in his ex- 
pression of them with every change of a fickle and inconsistent 
temperament. The atmosphere of Cain is almost wholly nega- 
tive ; for under the guise of a drama, which is mainly a dialogue 
between two halves of his mind, the author appears to sweep aside 
with something approaching to disdain the answers of a blindly 
accepted tradition, or of a superficial optimism, e. g. — 

Cain, " Then my father's God did well 

When he prohibited the fatal tree. 
Lucifer. " But had done better in not planting it." 

Again, a kid, after suffering agonies from the sting of a reptile, is 
restored by antidotes — 

" Behold, my son ! said Adam, how from evil 

Springs good ! 
Lucifer. " What didst thou answer ? 

Cain. " Nothing ; for 

He is my father ; but I thought that 'twere 

A better portion for the animal 

Never to have been stung at all." 

This rebellious nature naturally yields to the arguments of Lucifer, 
a spirit in which much of the grandeur of Milton's Satan is added 
to the subtlety of Mephistopheles. In the first scene Cain is in- 
troduced, rebelling against toils imposed on him by an offence 
committed before he was born — " I sought not to be born " — the 
answer, that toil is a good, being precluded by its authoritative 
representation as a punishment; in which mood he is confirmed 
by the entrance and reasonings of the Tempter, who identifies the 
Deity with Seva the Destroyer, hints at the dreadful visitation of 
the yet untasted death ; when Adah, entenng, takes him at first 
for an angel, and then recognises him as a fiend. Her invocation 
to Eve, and comparison of the " heedless, harmless, wantonness 
of bliss " in Eden, to the later lot of those girt about with demons 
from whose fascination they cannot fly, is one of the most striking 
in the drama ; as is the line put into the mouth of the poet's most 
beautiful female character, to show that God cannot be alone — 

" What else can joy be, but diffusing joy ? " 

7 



g8 BYRO^r. 

Her subsequent contrast of Lucifer with the other angels is 
more after the style of Shelley than anything else in Byron — 

" As the silent sunny moon, 
All light, they look upon us. But thou seem'st 
Like an ethereal night, where long white clouds 
Streak the deep purple, and unnumber'd stars 
Spangle the wonderful mysterious vault 
With things that look as if they would be suns — 
So beautiful, unnumber'd, and endearing ; 
Not dazzling, and yet drawing us to them, 
They fill my eyes with tears, and so dost thou." 

The flight with Lucifer, in the second act, in the abyss of space 
and through the Hades of " uncreated night," with the vision of 
long-wrecked worlds, and the " interminable gloomy realms 

" Of swimming shadows and enormous shapes " 

— suggested, as the author tells us, by the reading of Cuvier — 
leaves us with impressions of grandeur and desolation which no 
other passages of English poetry can convey. Lord Byron has 
elsewhere exhibited more versatility of fancy and richness of illus- 
tration, but nowhere else has he so nearly " struck the stars." 
From constellation to constellation the pair speed on, cleaving the 
blue with mighty wings, but finding in all a blank, like (hat in 
Richter's wonderful dream. The result on the mind of Cain is 
summed in the lines on the fatal tree — 

" It was a lying tree — for we knoiu nothing ; 
At least, \X. protm'scd hficnuledge at the price 
Of death — but knowledge still ; but what knows man ? " 

A more modern poet answers, after beating at the same iron 
gates, " Behold, we know not anything." The most beautiful re- 
maining passage is Cain's reply to the question — what is more 
beautiful to him than all that he has seen in the " unimaginable 
ether ? "— 

" My sister Adah. — .\11 the stars of heaven, 
The deep blue noon of night, lit by an orb 
Which looks a spirit, or a spirit's world — 
The hues of twilight — the sun's gorgeous coming — 
His setting indescribable, which fills 
My eyes with pleasant tears as I behold 
Him sink, and feel my heart flow softly with him 
Along that western paradise of clouds — 
The forest shade — the green bough — the bird's voice— 
The vesper bird's, which seems to sing of love, 
And mingles with the song of cherubim, 
As the day closes over Eden's walls : — 
All these are nothing, to my eyes and heart, 
Like Adah's face." 

Lucifer's speech at the close of the act is perhaps too Miltonic - 
to be absolutely original. Returning to earth, we have a pastoral, 



BYRON. 



99 



of which Sir Egerton Brydges justly and sufKciently remarks, " The 
censorious may say what they will, but there are speeches in the 
mouth of Cain and Adah, especially regarding their child, which 
nothing in Enghsh poetry but the 'wood-notes wild ' of Shakspeare 
ever equalled." Her cry, as Cain seems to threaten the infant, 
followed by the picture of his bloom and joy, is a touch of perfect 
pathos. Then comes the interview with the pious Abel, who is 
amazed at the lurid light in the eyes of his brother, with the spheres 
"singing in thunder round " him — the two sacrifices, the murder, 
the shriek of Zillah — 

" Father ! Eve ! 
Adah ! come hither ! Death is in the world ; " 

Cain's rallying from stupor — 

" I am awake at last — a dreary dream 
Had madden'd rae, — but he shall never wake : " 

the curse of Eve ; and the close — /xsT^o-.' rj xa-d ddxpoa — 

Cain. " Leave me. 

Adah. " Why all have left thee. 

Cain. " And wherefore lingerest thou .? Dost thou not fear ? 
Adah. " I fear 

Nothing except to leave thee. 

Cain. " Eastward from Eden will we take our way. 
Adah. " Leave ! thou shall be my guide ; and may our God 

Be thine ! Now let us carry forth our children. 
Cain. " And /ig who lieth there was childless. I 

Have dried the fountain of a gentle race. 

O Abel ! 
Adah. " Peace be with him. 

Cain. " But with »zf .' " 

Cain, between which and the Cencz lies the award of the greatest 
single performance in dramatic shape of our century, raised a 
storm. It was published, with Sa7'da7iapahis and The Two Fos- 
cari, in December, 1821, and the critics soon gave evidence of the 
truth of Elze's remark — " In England freedom of action is cramped 
by the want of freedom of thought. The converse is the c?se with 
us Germans ; freedom of thought is restricted bv the want of free- 
dom in action. To us this scepticism presents nothing in the least 
fearful." But with us it appeared as if a literary Guy Fawkes had 
been detected in the act of blowing up half the cafTTedrais and all 
the chapels of the country. The rage of insular orthodox}' was in 
proportion to its impotence. Every scribbler with a cassock de- 
nounced the book and its author, though few attempted to answer 
him. The hubbub was such that Byron wrote to Murray, authoris- 
ing him to disclaim all responsibility, and offering to refund the 



lOO BYRON. 

payment he had received. " Say that both you and Mr. Gifford 
remonstrated. I will come to England to stand trial. ' Me me 
adsum qui feci ' " — and much to the same effect. The book was 
pirated ; and on the publisher's application to have an injunction, 
Lord Eldon refused to grant it. The majority of the minor re- 
viewers became hysterical, and Dr. Watkins, amid much almost' 
inarticulate raving, said that Sir Walter Scott, who had gratefully | 
accepted the dedication, would go down to posterity with the brand 
of Cain upon his brow. Several even of the higher critics took 
fright. Jeffrey, while protesting his appreciation of the literary 
merits of the work, lamented its tendency to unsettle faith. Mr. 
Campbell talked of its " frightful audacity." Bishop Heber wrote 
at great length to prove that its spirit was more dangerous than 
that of Paradise Lost — and succeeded. The Quarterly began to 
cool towards the author. Moore wrote to him, that Cain was 
" wonderful, terrible, never to be forgotten," but " dreaded and 
deprecated " the influence of Shelley. Byron showed the letter to 
Shelley, who wrote to a common friend to assure Mr. Moore that 
he had not the smallest influence over his lordship in matters of 
religion, and only wished he had, as he would "employ it to eradi- 
cate from his great mind the delusions of Christianity, which seem 
perpetually to recur, and to lie in ambush for the hours of sickness 
and distress." Shelley elsewhere writes: "What think you of 
Lord B.'s last volume ? In my opinion it contains finer poetry than 
has appeared in England since Paradise Lost. Cain is apocalyptic ; 
it is a revelation not before communicated to man." In the same 
strain, Scott says of the author of the "grand and tremendous 
drama:" "He has certainly matched Milton on his own ground." 
The worst effect of those attacks appears in the shifts to which 
Byron resorted to explain himself — to be imputed, however, not to 
cowardice, but to his wavering habit of mind. Great writers in our 
country have frequently stirred difficult questions in religion and 
life, and then seemed to be half scared, like Rouget de Lisle, by 
the reverberation of their own voices. Shelley almost alone was 
always ready to declare, " I meant what I said, and stand to it." 

Byron having, with or without design, arraigned some of the 
Thirty-nine Articles of his countrymen, proceeded in the following 
month (October, 1S21) to commit an outrage, yet more keenly re- 
sented, on the memory of their sainted king, the pattern of private 
virtue and public vice, George III. The perpetration of this oc- 
curred in the course of the last of his numerous literary duels, of 
which it was the close. That Mr. Southey was a well-meaning and 
independent man of letters there can be no doubt. It does not 
require the conclusive testimony of the esteem of Savage Landor 
to compel our respect for the author of the Life of Nelson, and the 
open-handed friend of Coleridge ; nor is it any disparagement that, 
with the last-named and with Wordsworth, he in middle hfe changed 
his political and other opinions. But in his dealings with Lord 
Byron, Southey had "eaten of the insane root." He attacked a 
man of incomparably superior powers, for whom his utter want of 



BYROM loi 

humour — save in its comparatively childish forms — made him a 
ludicrously unequal match, and paid the penalty in being gibbeted 
in satires that will endure with the language. The strife, which 
seems to have begun on Byron's leaving England, rose to its height 
when his lordship, in the humorous observations and serious de- 
fence of his character against " the Remarks " in Blackwood, 1819 
(August), accused the Laureate of apostasy, treason, and slander. 

In 1821, when the latter pubhshed his Vision of Judgment — the 
most quaintly preposterous panegyric ever penned — he prefixed to 
it a long explanatory note, in the course of which he characterises 
Don Juan as a " monstrous combination of horror and mockery, 
lewdness and impiety," regrets that it has not been brought under 
the lash of the law, salutes the writer as chief of the Satanic school, 
inspired by the spirits of Moloch and Belial, and refers to the re- 
morse that will overtake him on his death-bed. To which Byron, 
inter alia: "Mr. Southey, with a cowardly ferocity, exults over 
the anticipated deatli-bed repentance of the objects of his dislike, 
and indulges himself in a pleasant ' Vision of Judgment,' in prose 
as well as verse, full of impious impudence. What Mr. Southey's 
sensations or ours may be in the awful moment of leaving this state 
of existence, neither he nor we can pretend to decide. In common, 
I presume, with most men of any reflection, /have not waited for 
a death-bed to repeat of many of my actions, notwithstanding the 
* diabolical pride ' which this pitiful renegado in his rancour would 
impute to those who scorn him." This dignified, though trenchant, 
rejoinder would have been unanswerable ; but the writer goes on 
to charge the Laureate with spreading calumnies. To this charge 
Southey, in January, 1822, replies with "a direct and positive 
denial," and then proceeds to talk at large of the "whip and brand- 
ing iron," " slaves of sensuality," " stones from slings," " Gcliaths," 
" public panders," and what not, in the manner of the brave days 
of old. 

In February, Byron, having seen this assault in the Courier, 
writes off in needless heat, " I have got Southey's pretended 
reply ; what remains to be done is to call him out " — and de- 
patches a cartel of mortal defiance. Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, through 
whom this was sent, judiciously suppressed it, and the author's 
thirst for literary blood was destined to remain unquenched. 
Meanwhile he had written his own Vision of Judgment. This ex- 
traordinary work, having been refused by both Murray and Long- 
man, appeared in 1822 in the pages of the Liberal. It passed the 
bounds of British endurance ; and the publisher, Mr. John Hunt, 
was prosecuted and fined for the publication. 

Readers of our day will generally admit that the " gouty hexam- 
eters " of the original poem, which celebrates the apotheosis of 
King George in heaven, are much more blasphemous than the 
ottava rima of the travesty, which professes to narrate the difficul- 
ties of his getting there. Byron's Vision of Judgment is as un- 
mistakably the first of parodies as i\\Q Iliad \s the first of epics, or 
the Pilg}if>i's Progress ih^ first of allegories. In execution it is 



102 BYRON. 

almost perfect. Don Juan is in scope and magnitude a far wider 
work; but no considerable series of stanzas in Don Juan are so 
free from serious artistic flaw. From first to last, every epithet 
hits the white ; every line that does not convulse with laughter 
stings or lashes. It rises to greatness by the fact that, underneath 
all its lambent buffoonery, it is aflams with righteous wrath. No- 
where in such space, save in some of the prose of Swift, is there 
in English so much scathing satire. 



BYRON. ,03 



CHAPTER IX. 
[1821-1823.] 

PISA. — GENOA. — DON JUAN. 

Byron, having arrived at Pisa with hi.s troop of carriages, horses, 
dogs, fowls, monkeys, and servants, settled himself quietly in the 
Palazzo Lanfranchi for ten months, interrupted only by a sojourn 
of six weeks in the neighbourhood of Leghorn. His life in the 
old feudal building followed in the main the tenour of his life at 
Ravenna. He rose late, received visitors in the afternoons, played 
billiards, rode or practised with his pistols in concert with Shelley, 
whom he refers to at this time as '-the most companionable man 
under thirty " he had ever met. Both poets were good shots, but 
Byron the safest; for, though his hand often shook, he made al- 
lowance for the vibration, and never missed his mark. On one 
occasion he set up a slender cane, and at twenty paces divided it 
with his bullet. The early part of the evening he gave to a frugal 
meal and the society of La Guiccioli — now apparently, in defiance 
of the statute of limitations, established under the same roof — and 
then sat late over his verses. He was disposed to be more soci- 
able than at Venice or Ravenna, and occasionally entertained 
strangers ; but his intimate acquaintanceship was confined to Cap>- 
tain Williams and his wife, and Shelley's cousin, Captain Medwin. 
The latter used frequently to dine and sit with his host till the 
morning, collecting materials for the Cormersaiions which he after- 
wards gave to the world. The value of these reminiscences is 
impaired by the fact of their recording, as serious revelations, 
the absurd confidences in which the poet's humour for mystifica- 
tion was wont to indulge. Another of the group, an Irishman, 
called Taafe, is made, in his lordship's correspondence of the 
period, to cut a somewhat comical figure. The master-passion of 
this worthy and genial fellow was to get a publisher for a fair com- 
mentary on Dante, to which he had firmly linked a very bad trans- 
lation, and for about six months Byron pesters Murray with con- 
stant appeals to satisfy him ; e. g., November 16, " He must be 
gratified, though the reviewers will make him suffer more tortures 
than there are in his original." March 6, " He will die if he is not 
published ; he will be damned if he is ; but that he don't mind." 



104 BYRON. 

March 8, " I make it a point that he shall be in print; ifwill make 
the man so exuberantly happy. He is such a good-natured Chris- 
tian that we must give liim a shove through the press. Besides, 
he has had another fall from his horse into a ditch." Taafe, whose 
horsemanship was on a par with his poetry, can hardly have been 
consulted as to tlie form assumed by these apparently fruitless rec- 
ommendations, so characteristic of the writer's frequent kindli> 
ness and constant love of mischief. About this time Byron re- 
ceived a letter from Mr. Shepherd, a gentleman in Somersetshire, 
referring to the death of his wife, among whose papers he had 
found the record of a touching, because evidently heart-felt, prayer 
for the poet's reformation, conversion, and restored peace of mind. 
To this letter he at once returned an answer, marked by much of 
the fine feeling of his best moods. Pisa, December 8: "Sir, I 
have received your letter. I need not say that the extract which it 
contains has affected me, because it would imply a want of all feel- 
ing to have read it with indifference. . . . Your brief and simple 
picture of the excellent person, whom I trust you will again meet, 
cannot be contemplated without the admiration due to her virtues 
and her pure and unpretending piety. I do not know that I ever 
met with anything so unostentatiously beautiful. Indisputably, the 
firm believers in the Gospel have a great advantage over all others 
— for this simple reason, that if true they will have their reward 
hereafter; and if there be no hereafter, they can but be with the 
infidel in his eternal sleep. . . . But a man's creed does not de- 
pend upon himself : who can say, I will believe this, that, or the 
other ? and least of all that which he least can comprehend. . . . 
I can assure you that not all the fame which ever cheated humanity 
into higher notions of its own importance would ever weigh in my 
mind against the pure and pious interest which a virtuous being 
may be pleased to take in my behalf. In this point of view I 
would not exchange the prayer of the deceased in my behalf for 
the united glory of Homer, Cassar, and Napoleon." 

The letter to Lady Byron, which he afterwards showed to Lady 
Blessington, must have borne about the same date ; and we have 
a further indication of his thoughts reverting homeward in an 
urgent request to Murray — written on December loth, Ada's sixth 
birthday — to send his daughter's miniature. After its arrival noth- 
ing gave him greater pleasure than to be told of its strong likeness 
to himself. In the course of the same month an event occurred 
which strangely illustrates the manners of the place, and the char- 
acter of the two poets. An unfortunate fanatic having taken it 
into his head to steal the wafer-box out of a church at Lucca, and 
being detected, was, in accordance with the ecclesiastical law till 
lately maintained against sacrilege, condemned to be burnt alive. 
Shelley, who believed that the sentence would really be carried into 
effect, proposed to Byron that they should gallon off together, and 
by aid of their servants rescue by force the intended victim. Byron, 
however, preferred, in the first place, to rely on diplomacy; some 
vigorous letters passed ; ultimately a representation, conveyed by 



B YROy. 



I OS 



Taafe to the English Ambassador, led to a commutation of the 
sentence, and the man was sent to the galleys. 

The January of 1822 was marked by the addition to the small 
circle of Captain E. J. Trelawny, the famous rover and bold f;ee- 
lance (now sole survivor of the remarkable group), who accompanied 
Lord Byron to Greece, and has recorded a variety of incidents of 
tlie last months of his life. Trelawny, who appreciated Shelley 
with an intensity that is often apt to be exclusive, saw, or has re- 
ported, for the most part the weaker side of Byron. We are con- 
strained to accept as correct the conjecture that his judgment was 
bias.'ied by their rivalry in physical prowess, and the political differ- 
ences which afterwards developed between them. Letters to his 
old correspondents — to Scott about the Waverleys, to Murray 
about the Dramas, and the Vision of Judginent, and Cain — make 
up almost the sole record of the poet's pursuits during the five fol- 
lowing months. On February 6 he sent, through Mr. Kinnaird, 
the challenge to Southey, of the suppression of which he was not 
aware till May 17. The same letter contains a sheaf of the random 
cynicisms, as — " Cash is virtue," " Money is power ; and when 
Socrates said he knew nothing, he meant he had not a drachma " 
■ — by which he sharpened the shafts of his assailants. A little 
later, on occasion of the death of Lady Noel, he expresses himself 
with natural bitterness on hearing that she had in her will recorded 
a wish against his daughter Ada seeing his portrait. In March he 
sat, along with La Guiccioli, to the sculptor Bartolini. On the 
24t]i, when the company were on one of their riding excursions out- 
side the town, a half-drunken dragoon on horseback broke through 
them, and by accident or design knocked Shelley from his seat. 
Byron, pursuing him along the Lung' Arno, called for his name, 
and, taking him for an officer, flung his glove. The sound of the 
fray brought the servants of the Lanfranchi to the door ; and one 
of them, it was presumed — though in the scuffle everything remained 
uncertain — seriously wounded the dragoon in the side. An in- 
vestigation ensued, as the result of which the Gambas were ulti- 
mately exiled from Tuscany, and the party of friends was practi- 
cally broken up. Shelley and his wife, with the VVilliamses and 
Trelawny, soon after settled at the Villa Magni at Lerici, in the 
Gulf of Spezia. Byron, with the Countess and her brother, 
established themselves in the Villa Rossa, at Monte Nero, a suburb 
of Leghorn, from which port at this date the remains of Allegra 
were conveyed to England. 

Among the incidents of this residence were, the homage paid 
to the poet by a party of Americans ; the painting of his portrait 
and that of La Guiccioli by their compatriot, West, who has left a 
pleasing account of his visits: Byron's letter making inquiry about 
the country of Bolivar (where it was his fancy to settle); and an- 
other of those disturbances by which he seemed destined to be 
harassed. One of his servants — among whom were unruly spirits, 
apparently selected with a kind of Corsair bravado — had made an 
assault on Count Pietro, wounding him in the face. This outburst, 



io6 BYRON. 

though followed by tears and penitence, confirmed the impression 
of the Tuscan police that the whole company were dangerous, and 
made the Government press for their departure. In the midst of 
the uproar, there suddenly appeared at the villa Mr. Leigh Hunt, 
with his wife and six children. They had taken passage to Genoa, 
where they were received by Trelawny, in command of the 
" Bolivar " — a yacht constructed in that port for Lord Byron, 
simultaneously with the " Don Juan " for Shelley. The latter, on 
hearing of the arrival of his friends, came to meet them at Leghorn, 
and went with them to Pisa. Early in July they were all established 
on the Lung' Arno, having assigned to them the ground-floor of 
the palazzo. 

We have now to deal briefly — amid conflicting asseverations it 
is hard to deal fairly — with the last of the vexatiously controverted 
episodes which need perplex our narrative. Byron, in wishing 
Moore from Ravenna a merry Christmas for 1820, proposes that 
they shall embark together in a newspaper, " with some improve- 
ment on the plan of the present scoundrels." " to give the age some 
new lights on poHcy, poesy, biography, criticism, morality, theology," 
&c. Moore absolutely refusing to entertain the idea. Hunt's name 
was brought forward in connexion with it, during the visit of 
Shelley. Shortly after the return of the latter to Pisa, he writes 
(August 26) to Hunt, stating that Byron was anxious to start a 
periodical work, to be conducted in Italy, and had proposed that 
they should both go shares in the concern, on whicli follow some 
suggestions of difficulties about money. Nevertheless, in August, 
1821, he presses Hunt to come. Moore, on the other hand, strongly 
remonstrates against the project. " I heard some days ago that 
Lei^h Hunt was on his way to you with all his family ; and the idea 
seems to be that you and he and Shelley are to conspire together 
in the Examiner. I deprecate such a plan with all my might. 
Partnerships in fame, like those in trade, make the strongest party 
answer for the rest. I tremble even for you with such a bankrupt 
Co. ! You must stand alone." Shelley — who had in the meantime 
o-iven his b^nd to Byron for an advance of 200/. towards the 
expenses o* his friends, besides assisting them himself to the 
utmost of his power— began, shortly before their arrival, to express 
grave doubts as to the success of the alliance. His last published 
letter, written July 5, 1822, after they have settled at Pisa, is full 
of forebodings. On Uie 8th heeet sail in the " Don Juan " — 

" That fatal and perfidious bark, 
Built in th' eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark," 

and was overtaken by the storm in which he perished. Three 
days after, Trelawny rode to Pisa, and told Byron of his fears, 
when the poet's lips'quivered, and his voice faltered. On the 22nd 
of July the bodies of Shelley, Williams, and Vivian were cast 
ashore. On the i6th August, Hunt, Byron, and Trelawny were 
present at the terribly weird cremation, which they have all de- 



i> 



BYRON. 



107 



scribed, and after which they were seized with a fit of the hilarious 
delirium which is one of the phases of the tension of grief. Byron's 
references to the event are expressions less of the loss which he 
indubitably felt, than of his indignation at the " world's wrong." 
" Thus,'' he writes, " there is another man gone, about whom the 
world was illnaturedlv and ignorantly and brutally mistaken. It 
will, perhaps, do him justice now, when he can be no better for it." 
Towards the end of the same letter the spirit of his dead friend 
seems to inspire the sentence — " With these things and these 
fellows it is necessary, in the present clash of philosophy and 
tyranny, to throw away the scabbard. I know it is against fearful 
odds, but the battle must be fought." 

Meanwhile, shortly after the new settlement at the Lanfranchi, 
the preparations for issuing the Liberal — edited by Leigh Hunt in 
Italy, and published by John Hunt in London — progressed. The 
first number, which appeared in September, was introduced, after 
a few words of preface, by the Vision of Judgmerit, with the 
signature, Quevedo Redivivus, and adorned by Shelley's trans- 
lation of the " May-Day Night," in Faust. It contained, besides, 
the Letter to the Editor of my Grandmother'' s Review, an indif- 
ferent Florentine story, a German apologue, and a gossipping 
account of Pisa, presumably by Hunt. Three others followed, 
containing Byron's Heaven attd Earth, his translation of the 
Morgante Maggiore, and The Blues — a very slight, if not. sill}', 
satire on literary ladies; some of Shelley's posthumous minor 
poems, among them *' 1 arise from dreams of thee," and a few of 
Hazlitt's essays, including, however, none of his best. Leigh Hunt 
himself v.rote most of the rest, one of his contributions being a 
palpable imitation of Don Jtian, entitled the Book of Beginnings ; 
but he confes^^s that, owing to his weak health and low spirits at 
the time, none of these did justice to his ability ; and the general 
manner of the magazine being insufficiently vigorous to carry off 
the frequent eccentricity of its matter, the prejudices against it 
prevailed, and the enterprise came to an end. Partners in failing 
concern^ are apt to dispute ; in this instance the unpleasantness 
which arose at the time rankled in the mind of the survivor, and 
gave rise to his singularly tasteless and injudicious book — a per- 
formance which can be only in part condoned by the fact of Hunt's 
afterwards expressing regret, and practically withdrawing it. He 
represents himself throughout as a much-injured man, lured to 
Italy by misrepresentations that he might give the aid of his 
journalistic experience and undeniable talents to the advancement 
of a mercenary enterprise, and that when it failed he was despised, 
insulted, and rejected. Byron, on the other hand, declares, " The 
Hunts pressed me to engage in this work, and in an evil hour I 
consented;" and his subsequent action in the matter — if not 
always gentle, never unjust — goes to verify his statements in the 
letters of the period. " I am afraid," he writes from Genoa, 
October 9, 1822, " the journal is a bad business. I have done all 
I can for Leigh Hunt since he came here; but it is almost useless. 



io8 BYRON. 

His wife is ill, his six children not very tractable, and in the 
affairs of this world he himself is a child." Later he says to 
Murray, "You and your friends, by your injudicious rudeness, 
cement a connexion which you strove to prevent, and which, had 
the Hunts prospered, would not in all probability have continued. 
As it is ... I can't leave them among the breakers." On 
February 20 we have his last word on the subject, to the same 
effect. 

In the following sentences Moore seems to give a fair state- 
ment of the motives which led to the establishment of the un- 
fortunate journal : " The chief inducements on the part of Lord 
Byron to this unworthy alliance were, in the first place, a wish to 
second the kind views of his friend Shelley in inviting Mr. Hunt 
to Italy ; and in the next, a desire to avail himself of the aid of one 
so experienced as an editor in the favourite object he has so long 
contemplated of a periodical work in which all the offspring of bis 
genius might be received as they sprung to light." For the ac- 
complishment of this purpose Mr. Leigh Hunt was a singularly ill- 
chosen associate. A man of Radical opinions on all matters, not 
only of religion but of society — opinions which he acquired and 
held easily but firmly — could never recognise the propriety of the 
claim to deference which "the noble poet" was always too eager 
to assert, and was inclined to take liberties which his patron per- 
haps superciliously repelled. Mrs. Hunt does not seem to have 
been a very judicious person. " Trelawny here," said Byron, 
jocularly, " has been speaking against my morals." "It is the 
first time I ever heard of them," she replied. Mr. Hunt, by his 
own admission, had " peculiar notions on the subject of money." 
Byron, on his part, was determined not to be "put upon," and 
doled out through his steward stated allowances to Hunt, wh5 
says that only "stern necessity and a large family" induced him to 
accept them. Hunt's expression that the 200/. was, iti the fir'st 
ijistance, a debt to Shelley, points to the conclusion that it was 
remitted on that poet's death. Besides this, Byron maintained the 
family till they left Genoa for Florence, in 1823, and defrayed up 
to that date all their expenses. He gave his contributions to the 
Liberal gratis ; and, again by Hunt's own confession, left to him 
and his brother the profits of the proprietorship. According to 
Mr. Gait, "The whole extent of the pecuniary obligation appears 
not to have exceeded 500/. ; but, little or great, the manner in 
which it was recollected reflects no credit either on the head or 
heart of the debtor." 

Of the weaknesses on which the writer — bent on verifying 
Pope's lines on Atossa — from his vantage in the ground-floor, was 
enabled to dilate, many are but slightly magnified. We are told, 
for instance, in very many words, that Byron clungto the privileges 
of his rank while wishing to seem above them ; tliat he had a small 
library, and was a one-sided critic ; that Bayle and Gibbon supplied 
him with the learning he had left at school ; that, being a good 
rider with a graceful seat, he liked to be told of it ; that he showed 



BYRON. 



XO9 



letters he ought not to have shown ; that he pretended to think 
worse of Wordsworth than he did ; that he knew little of art or 
music, adored Rossini, and called Rubens a dauber ; that, though 
he wrote Don Jtian under gin and water, he had not a strong head, 
&c., &c. It is true, but not new. But when Hunt proceeds to say 
that Byron had no sentiment ; that La Guiccioli did not really care 
much about him ; that he admired Gifford because he was a syco- 
phant, and Scott because he loved a lord ; that he had no heart for 
anything except a feverish notoriety; that he was a miser from his 
birth and had " as little regard for liberty as Alfieri " — it is new 
enough, but it is manifestly not true. Hunt's book, which begins 
with a caricature on the frontispiece, and is inspired in the main 
by uncharitableness, yet contains here and there gleams of a deeper 
insight than we find in all the volumes of Moore — an insight 
whicli, in spite of his irritated egotism, is the mark of a man 
with the instincts of a poet, with some ccsmopolitan sympathies, 
and a courage on occasion to avow them at any risk. " Lord 
Byron," he says truly, " has been too much admired by the English 
because he was sulky and wilful, and reflected in his own person 
their love of dictation and excitement. They owe his memory a 
greater regard, and would do it much greater honour, if they admired 
him for letting them know they were not so perfect a nation as they 
supposed themselves, and that they might take as well as give les- 
sons of humanity, by a candid comparison of notes with civilization 
at large." 

In July, when at Leghorn, the Gambas received orders to leave 
Tuscany ; and on his return to Pisa, Byron, being persecuted by 
the police, began to prepare for another change. After entertaining 
projects about Greece, America, and Switzerland — Trelawny under- 
taking to have the " Bolivar" conveyed over the Alps to the Lake 
of Geneva — he decided on following his friends to Genoa. He left 
in September with La Guiccioli, passed by Lerici and Sestri, and 
then for the ten remaining months of his Italian life took up his 
quarters at Albaro, about a mile to the east of the city, in the Villa 
Saluzzo, which Mrs. Shelley had procured for him and his party. 
She herself settled with the Hunts — who travelled about the same 
time, at Byron's expense, but in their own company — in the neigh- 
bouring Casa Negroto. Not far off, Mr. Savage Landor was in 
possession of the Casa Pallavicini, but there was little intercourse 
between the thrfee. Landor and Byron, in many respects more 
akin than any other two Englishmen of their age, were always 
separated by an unhappy bar or intervening mist. The only family 
with whom the poet maintained any degree of intimacy was that of 
the Earl of Blessington, consisting of the Earl himself — a gouty old 
gentleman, with stories about him of the past — the Countess, and 
her sister, Miss Power, and the " cupidon d^chaind," the Anglo- 
French Count Alfred d'Orsay — who were to take part in stories of 
the future. In the spring of 1823, Byron persuaded them to occupy 
the Villa Paradiso, and was accustomed to accompany them 
frequently on horseback excursions along the coast to their 



no BYROAT. 

favourite Nervi. It has been said that Lady Blessington's Con- 
versations with Lord Byron are, as regards trustworthiness, on a 
par with Landor's Imaginary Conversations. Let this be so, they 
are still of interest on points of fact which it must have been easier 
to record than to imagine. However adorned, or the reverse, by 
the fancies of a habitual novelist, they convey the impressions of a 
good-humoured, lively, and fascinating woman, derived from a 
more or less intimate association with the most brilliant man of the 
ao-e. Of his personal appearance — a matter of which she was a 
good judge — we have the following : " One of Byron's eyes was 
larger than the other : his nose was rather thick, so he was best 
seen in profile ; his mouth was splendid, and his scornful expres- 
sion was real, not affected ; but a sweet smile often broke through 
his melancholy. He was at this time very pale and thin (which 
indicates the success of his regimen of reduction since leaving 
Venice). His hair was dark brown, here and there turning grey. 
His voice was harmonious, clear, and low. There is some gaucherie 
in his walk, from his attempts to conceal lameness. Ada's portrait 
is like him, and he is pleased at the likeness, but hoped she would 
not turn out to be clever — at any event not poetical. He is fond of 
gossip, and apt to speak slightingly of some of his friends, but is 
loyal to others. His great defect is tiippancy, and a total want of 
self-possession." The narrator also dwells on his horror of inter- 
viewers, by whom at this time he was even more than usually beset. 
One visitor of the period ingenuouly observes — " Certain persons 
will be chagrined to hear that Byron's mode of life does not furnish 
the smallest food for calumny." Another says, " I never saw a 
countenance more composed and still — I might even add, more 
sweet and prepossessing. But his temper was easily ruffled, and 
for a whole day ; he could not endure the ringing of bells, bribed 
his neighbours to repress their noises, and failing, retaliated by 
surpassing them ; he never forgave Colonel Carr for breaking one 
of his dog's ribs, though he generally forgave injuries without 
forgetting them. He had a bad opinion of the inertness of the 
Genoese ; for whatever he himself did he did with a will — ' toto se 
corpore miscuit,' and was wont to assume a sort of dictatorial tone 
■ — as if ' I have said it, and it must be so,' were enough." 

From these waifs and strays of gossip we return to a subject of 
deeper interest. The Countess of Blessington, with natural curi- 
osity, was anxious to elicit from Byron some light on the mystery of 
his domestic affairs, and renewed the attempt previously made by 
Madame de Stael, to induce liim to some movement towards recon- 
ciiiation with his wife. His reply to this overture was to show her 
a letter which he had written to Lady Byron from Pisa, but never 
forwarded, of the tone of which the following extracts must be a 
sufficient indication : " I have to acknowledge the receipt of Ada's 
hair ... I also thank you for the inscription of the date and name ; 
and I will tell you why. I believe the}' are the only two or three 
words of your handwriting in my possession, for your letters I 
jeturned, and except the two words — or rather the one word * house* 



BYRON. 1X1 

hold ' written twice — in an o- cl account-book, I have no other. Every 
day which keeps us asunder should, after so long a period, rather 
soften our mutual feelings, which must always have one rallying- 
point as long as our child exists. We both made a bitter mistake, 
but now it is over. I considered our reunion as not impossible for 
more than a year after the separation, but then I gave up the hope. 
I am violent, but not malignant ; for only fresh provocations can 
awaken my resentment. Remember that if you have injured me in 
aught, this forgiveness is something, and that if I have injurfed you, 
it is something more still, if it be true, as moralists assert, that the 
most offending are the least forgiving." " It is a strange business," 
says the Countess, about Lady Byron. " When he was praising 
her mental and personal quahfications, I asked him. how all that he 
now said agreed with certain sarcasms supposed to be a reference 
to her in his works. He smiled, shook his head, and said, they 
were meant to spite and vex her, when he was wounded and irri- 
tated at her refusing to receive or answer his letters ; that he was 
sorry he had written them, but might on similar provocations recur 
to the same vengeance." On another occasion he said, " Lady 
B.'s first idea is what is due to herself. I wish she thought a little 
more of what is due to others. My besetting sin is a want of that 
self-respect which she has in excess. When 1 have broken on*, on 
slight provocation, into one of my ungovernable fits of rage, her 
calmness piqued and seemed to reproach me ; it gave her an air of 
superiority that vexed and increased my ?nauvazse humeur." To 
Lady Blessington, as to every one, he always spoke of Mrs. Leigh 
with the same unwavering admiration, love, and respect. 

" My first impressions were melancholy — my poor mother gave 
them ; but to my sister, who, incapable of wrong herself, suspected 
no wrong in others, I owe the httle good of which I can boast; and 
had I earlier known her it might have influenced my destiny. 
Augusta was to me in the hour of need a tower of strength. Her 
affection was my last rallving-point, and is now the only bright 
spot that the horizon of England offers to my view. She has given 
me such good advice — and yet, finding me incapable of following 
it, loved and pitied me but the more because I was erring." Simi- 
larly, in the height of his spleen, writes Leigh Hunt — " I believe 
there was one person to whom he would have been generous, if she 
pleased : perhaps was so. At all events, he left her the bulk of his 
property, and always spoke of her with the greatest esteem. This 
was his sister, Mrs. Leigh. He told me she used to call him ' Baby 
Bvron.' It was easy to see that of the two persons she had by far 
the greater judgment." 

^ Byron having laid aside Don yna?i for more than a year, in def- 
erence to La Guiccioli, was permitted to resume it again in July, 
1822, on a promise to observe the proprieties. Cantos vi.-xi. 
were written at Pisa. Cantos xii-xvi. at Genoa, in 1823. These 
latter portions of the poem were published by John Hunt. His 
other works of the period are of minor consequence. The Age of 
Bronze is a declamation, rather than a satire, directed against the 



XX2 



BYROiV. 



Convention of Cintra and the Congress of Verona, especially Lord 
Londonderry's part in the latter, only remarkable, from its advice 
to the Greeks, to dread 

" The false friend worse than the infuriate foe ; " 

i. e., to prefer the claw of the Tartar savage to the paternal hug of 
the great Bear — 



&' 



" Better still toil for masters, than await. 
The slave of slaves, before a Russian gate." 

In the Island — a tale of the mutiny of the " Bounty" — he reverts 
to the manner and theme of his old romances, finding a new scene 
in the Pacific for the exercise of his fancy. In this piece his love 
of nautical adventure reappears, and his idealisation of primitive 
life, caught from Rousseau and Chateaubriand. There is more 
repose about this poem than in any of the author's other composi- 
tions. In its pages the sea seems to plash about rocks and caves 
that bask under a southern sun. " ' Byron, the sorcerer,' he can 
do with me what he will," said old Dr. Parr, on reading it. As the 
swan-song of the poet's sentimental verse, it lias a pleasing if not a 
pathetic calm. During the last years in Italy he planned an epic 
on the Conquest and a play on the subject of Hannibal, neither of 
which was executed. 

In the criticism of a famous work theie is often little left to do 
but to criticise the critics — to bring to a focus the most salient 
things that have been said about it, to eliminate the absurd from 
the sensible, the discriminating from the commonplace. Don 
Juan, more than any of its precursors, is Byron, and it has been 
similarly handled. The early cantos were ushered into the world 
amid a chorus of mingled applause and execration. The minor 
Reviews, representing middle-class respectability, were generally 
vituperative, and the higher authorities divided in their judgments. 
The British Ma^azim said that " his lordship had degraded his 
personal character by the composition ; " the London, that the poem 
was " a satire on decency ; " the Edinburgh Monthly, that it was 
"a melancholy spectacle;" the Eclectic, \h2X it was " an outrage 
worthy of detestation." Blackwood declared that the author was 
"brutally outraging all the best feelings of humanity." Moore 
characterises it as " the most painful display of the versatility of 
genius that has ever been left for succeeding ages to wonder at or 
deplore." Jeffrev found in the whole composition " a tendency to 
destroy all belief'in the reality of virtue ; " and Dr. John Watkins 
classically named it "the Odyssey of Immorality." ''Don Juan 
will be read," wrote one critic, " as long as satire, wit, mirth, and 
supreme excellence shall be esteemed among men." " Stick to 
Don Jjcan,'' exhorted another; " it is the only sincere thing you 
have written, and it will live after all your Harolds have ceased to 
be • a school-girl's tale, the wonder of an hour.' It is the best ol 



BYRON. 



»i3 



all your works — the most spirited, the most straightforward, the 
most interesting, the most poetical." " It is a work," said Goethe, 
" full of soul, bitterly savage in its misanthropy, exquisitely delicate 
in its tenderness." Shelley confessed, " It fulfils in a certain de- 
gree what I have long preached, the task of producing something 
wholly new and relative to the age, and yet surpassingly beautiful." 
And Sir Walter Scott, in the midst of a hearty panegyric, " It has 
the variety of Shakspeare himself. Neither Childe Harold, nor 
(he most beautiful of Byron's earlier tales, contain more exquisite 
poetry than is to be found scattered through the cantos of Don 
JuoUy amid verses which the author seems to have thrown from 
him with an effort as spontaneous as that of a tree resigning its 
leaves." 

One noticeable feature about these comments is their sincerity : 
reviewing, however occasionally one-sided, had not then sunk to be 
the mere register of adverse or friendly cliques ; and, with all his 
anxiety for its verdict, Byron never solicited the favour of any por- 
tion of the press. Another is the fact that the adverse critics 
missed their mark. They had not learned to say of a l^ook of 
which they disapproved, that it was weak or dull : in pronouncing 
it to be vicious, they helped to promote its sale ; and the most de- 
cried has been the most widely read of the author's works. Many 
of the readers oi Don yuan have, it must be confessed, been founa 
among those least likely to admire in it what is most admirable — 
who have been attracted by the very excesses of l)uffoonery, viola- 
tions of good taste, and occasionally almost vulgar slang, which dis- 
figure its pages. Their patronage is, at the best, of no more value 
than that of a mob gathered by a showy Shakespearian revival, and 
it has laid the volume open to the charge of being adapted "laudari 
ab illaudatis." But the welcome of the work in other quarters is 
as indubitably due to higher qualities. In writing Don Jtian, 
Byron attempted something that had never been done before, and 
his genius so chimed with his enterprise that it need never be done 
again. " Down," cries M. Chasles, " with the imitators who did 
their best to make his name ridiculous." In commenting on their 
failure, an excellent critic has explained the pre-established fitness 
of the ottava rima — the first six lines of which are a dance, and the 
concluding couplet a " breakdown " — for the mock-heroic. Byron's 
choice of this measure may have been suggested by Whistlecraft ; 
but he had studied its cadence in Pulci, and the Novelle Galanti of 
Casti, to whom he is indebted for other features of his satire ; and 
he added to what has been well termed its characteristic jauntiness, 
by his almost constant use of the double rhyme. That the ottava 
rima is out of place in consistently pathetic poetry, may be seen 
from its obvious misuse in Keats's Pot of Basil. Many writers, 
from Frere to Moultrie, have employed it successfully in burlesque 
or mere society verse ; but Byron alone has employed it trium- 
phantly, for he has made it the vehicle of thoughts grave as well as 
gay, of "black spirits and white, red spirits and gray," of sparkling 
fancy, bitter sarcasm, and tender memories. He' has swept into 

8 



11^ BYRON. 

the pages of his poem the experience of thirty years of a life so 
crowded with vitahty that our sense of the plethora of power which 
it exhibits makes us ready to condone its lapses. Byron, it has 
been said, balances himself on a ladder like other acrobats ; but 
alone, like the Japanese master of the art, he all the while bears on 
his shoulders the weight of a man. Much of Doti yuan is as ob- 
noxious to criticism in detail as his earlier work; it has every mark 
of being written in hot haste. In the midst of the most serious 
passages {e.g., the "Ave Maria") we are checked in our course by 
bathos or commonplace, and thrown where the writer did not mean 
to throw us ; but the mocking spirit is so prevailingly present that 
we are often left in doubt as to his design, and what is in Harold 
an outrage is in this case only a flaw. His command over the verse 
itself is almost miraculous: he glides from extreme to extreme, 
from punning to pathos, from melancholy to mad merriment, sigh- 
ing or laughing by the way at his readers or at himself or at the 
stanzas. Into them he can fling anything under the sun, from a 
doctor's prescription to a metaphysical theory. 

" When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter, 
And proved it, 'twas no matter what he said," 

is as cogent a refutation of idealism as the cumbrous wit of Scotch 
logicians. 

The popularity of the work is due not mainly to the verbal skill 
which makes it rank as the cleverest of English verse compositions, 
to its shoals of witticisms, its winged words, telling phrases, and 
incomparable transitions ; but to the fact that it continues to ad- 
dress a large class who are not in the ordinary sense of the word 
lovers of poetry. Don Juan is emphatically the poem of intelligent 
men of middle age, who have grown weary of mere sentiment, and 
yet retain enough of sympathetic feeling to desire at times to re- 
call it. Such minds, crusted like Plato's Glaucus with the world, 
are yet pervious to appeals to the spirit that survives beneath the 
dry dust amid which they move ; l)ut only at rare intervals can 
they accompany the pure lyrist ''singing as if he would never be 
old," and they are apt to turn with some impatience even from 
Romeo and Juliet to Hamlet and Macbeth. To them, on the otlier 
hand, the hard wit of Hudibras is equally tiresome, and more dis- 
tasteful; their chosen friend is the humourist who, inspired by a 
subtle perception of the contradictions of life, sees matter for 
smiles in sorrow, and tears in laughter. Byron was not, in the 
highest sense, a great humourist ; he does not blend together the 
two phases, as they are blended in single sentences or whole chap- 
ters of Sterne, in the April sunshine of Richter, or in Sartor Re- 
sartus ; but he comes near to produce the same effect by his un- 
equalled power of alternating them. His wit is seldom hard, nevef 
dry, for it is moistened by the constant juxtaposition of sentiment 
His tenderness is none the less genuine that he is perpetually 
jerking it away — an equally favourite fashion with Carlyle — as if he 



BYRON. 

could not trust himself to be serious for fear of becoming senti. 
mental ; and, m recollection of his frequent exhibitions of unaf. 
tected hysteria, we accept his own confession — 

"If I laugh at any mortal thing, 
'Tis that I may not weep " — 

as a perfectly sincere comment on the most sincere, and therefore 
in many respects the most effective, of his works. He has after 
lus way .endeavoured in grave prose and light verse to defend it 
against Its assailants, saying, " In Don Juan I take a vicious and 
unprincipled character, and lead him through those ranks of society 
whose accomplishments cover and cloak their vices, and paint the 
natural effects ; and elsewhere, that he means to make his scamp 
end as a member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice or 
by the guillotine, or in an unhappy marriage." It were easv to 
d. ate on the fact that in interpreting the phrases of the satirist 
into the language of the moralist we often require to read them 
backwards: Byron's own statement, » I hate a motive," is how- 
ever, more to the point : ' ' 

"But the fact is that I have nothing plann'd 

Unless it were to be a moment merrv 

A novel word in my vocabulary." 

Don Juan can only be credited with a text in the sense in which 

every large experience, of its own accord, conveys its lesson It 

was to the author a picture of the world as he saw it; and it is to 

us a mirror in which every attribute of his genius, every peculiarity 

of his nature, is reflected without distortion. After the audacious 

though brilliant opening, and the unfortunately pungent reference 

to the poet's domestic affairs, we find in the famous storm (c ii ) 

a bewildering epitome of his prevailing manner. Home-sickness 

sea sickness, the terror of the tempest, " wailing, blasphemy, devo' 

tion, the crash of the wreck, the wild farewell, " the bubblincr cry 

of some strong swimmer in his agony," the horrors of famine'' the 

tale of the two fathers, the beautiful apparitions of the rainbow 

and the bird, the feast on Juan's spaniel, his reluctance to dine on 

'his pastor and his master," the consequences of eatino- Pedrillo 

--all follow each other like visions in the phantasmagoria of a 

nio^htmare, till at last the remnant of the crew are drowned bv a 

ndiculous rhyme — ^ 

" Finding no place for their landing better, 
They ran the boat ashore, and overset her." 

Then comes the episode of Haidee, "a long low island song of 
ancient days," the character of the girl herself being like a thread 
of pure gold running through the fabric of its surroundings, motley 
in every page ; e.g., after the impassioned close of the ^' Isles ol 
Greece," we have the stanza : — 



Il6 BYRON. 

" Thus sang, or would, or could, or should, have sung, 
The modern Greek, in tolerable Terse ; 
If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young, 
t Yet in those days he might have done much worse 

with which the author dashes away the romance of the song, and 
then launches into a tirade against Bob Southey's epic and Words- 
worth's pedlar poems. This vein exhausted, we come to the " Ave 
Maria," one of the most musical, and seemingly heartfelt, hymns 
in the language. The close of the ocean pastoral (in c. iv.) is the 
last of pathetic narrative in the book ; but the same feeling that 
"mourns o'er the beauty of the Cyclades " often re-emerges in 
shorter passages. The fifth and sixth cantos, in spite of the 
glittering sketch of Gulbeyaz, and the fawn-like image of Dudu, are 
open to Uie charge of ditfuseness, and the character of Johnson is 
a failure. From the seventh to the tenth, the poem decidedly dips, 
partly because the writer had never been in Russia; then it again 
rises, and shows no sign of falling off to the end. 

No part of the work has more suggestive interest or varied 
power than some of the later cantos, in which Juan is whirled 
through the vortex of the fashionable life which Byron knew so 
well, loved so much, and at last esteemed so little. There is no 
richer piece of descriptive writing in his works than that of New- 
stead (in c. xiii.) ; nor is there any analysis of female character so 
subtle as that of the Lady Adeline. Conjectures as to the orisjinals 
of imaginary portraits are generally futile ; but Miss Millpond— not 
Donna Inez — is obviously Lady Byron; in Adeline we may suspect 
that at Genoa he was drawing from the life in the Villa Paradiso; 
while Aurora R?.by seems to "be an idealization of La Guiccioli :— 

" Early in years, and yet more infantine 

In figure, she had something of sublime 
In eyes, which sadly shone, as seraphs shine : 

All youth — but with an aspect beyond time; 
Radiant and grave — as pitying man's decline : 

Mournful — but mournful of another's crime, 
She look'd as if she sat by Eden's door, 
And grieved for those who could return no more. 

•She was a Catholic, too, sincere, austere. 

As far as her own gentle heart allow'd, 
And deem'd that fallen worship far more dear. 

Perhaps, because 'tw;is fallen : her sires were proud 
Of deeds and days, when they had fill'd the ear 

Of nations, and had never bent or bow'd 
To novel power; and, as she was the last, 
She held her old faith and old feelingj fast. 

" She gazed upon a world she scarcely knew 
As seeking not to know it; silent, lone, 
As grows a flower, thus quietly she grew, 
And kept her heart serene within its zone." 



BYRON. 



117 



Constantly, towards the close of the work, there is an echo of 
home and country, a half involuntary cry after 

"The love of higher things and better days; 

Th* unbounded hope, and heavenly ignorance 
Of what is called the world and the world's ways." 

In the concluding stanza of the last completed canto, beginning— 

" Between two worlds life hovers like a star, 

'Twixt night and morn, on the horison's verge — " 

we have a condensation of the refrain of the poet's philosophy; 
but the main drift of the later books is a satire on London society. 
There are elements in a great city which may be wrought into 
something nobler than satire, for all the energies of the age are 
concentrated where passion is fiercest and thought intensest, amid 
the myriad sights and sounds of its glare and gloom. But those 
scenes, and the actors in them, are apt also to induce the frame of 
mind in which a prose satirist describes himself as rechnino- under 
an arcade of the Pantheon : " Not the Pantheon by the Piazza 
Navona, where the immortal gods were worshipped — the immortal 
gods now dead ; but the Pantheon in Oxford Str::et. Have not 
Selwyn, and Walpole, and March, and Carlisle figured there ? 
Has not Prince Florizel flounced through the hall in his rustling 
domino, and danced there in powdered splendour? O my com- 
panions, I have drunk many a bout with you, and always found 
' Vanitas Vanitatum ' written on the bottom of the pot." This is 
the mind in which D071 Juan interprets the universe, and paints 
the still living court of Florizel and his buffoons. A " nondescript 
and ever varying rhyme"— "a versified aurora boreiilis,' half 
cynical, half Epicurean, it takes a partial, though a cubtle view 
of tiiat microcosm on stilts called the great world. It complains 
that in the days of old " men made the manners— manners now 
make men." It concludes — 

" Good company's a chess-board ; there are kings, 
Queens, bishops, knights, rooks, pawns ; the world's a game." 

It passes from a reflection on "the dreary /«/7//«j- of all thinrs 
here " to the advice— 

"But ' carpe diem,' Juan, ' carpe, carpe ! ' 
To-morrow sees another race as gay 
And transient, and devoured by the same harpy. 
' Life's a poor player,'— then play out the play." 

Tt was the natural conclusion of the foregone stage of Byron's 
career. Years had given him power, but they were years in which 
hfs energies were largely wasted. Self-indulgence had not petri- 
fied bis feeling, but it had thrown wormwood into its springs. He 



Il8 BYRON. 

had learnt to look on existence as a walking shadow, and was 
strong only with the strength of a sincere despair. 

" Through life's road, so dim and dirty, 
I have dragg'd to three and thirty. 
"What have those years left to me.' 
Nothing, except thirty-three." 

These lines are the summary of one who had drained the draught 
of pleasure to the dregs of bitterness. 



£ YRON. 



119 



CHAPTER X. 
[1821-1824.] 

POLITICS. — THE CARBONARI. — EXPEDITION TO GREECE. — DEATH. 

In leaving Venice for Ravenna, Byron passed from the society 
of gondoliers and successive sultanas to a comparatively domestic 
life, with a mistress who at least endeavoured to stimulate some of 
his higher aspirations, and smiled upon his wearing the sword 
along with th« lyre. In the last episode of his constantly chequered 
and too voluptuous career, we have the waking of Sardanapalus 
realized in the transmutation of the fantastical Harold into a prac- 
tical strategist, and soldier. No one ever lived who in the same 
space more thoroughly ran the gauntlet of existence. Having ex- 
exhausted all other sources of vitality and intoxication — travel, 
gallantry, and verse — it remained for the despairing poet to 
become a hero. But he was also moved by a public passion, 
the genuineness of which there is no reasonable ground to 
doubt. Like Alfieri and Rousseau, he had taken for his motto. 
" I am of the opposition;" and, as Dante under a republic called 
for a monarcliy, Byron, under monarchies at home and abroad, 
called for a commonwealth. Amid the inconsistencies of his polit- 
ical sentiment, he had been consistent in so much love of liberty as 
led him to denounce oppression, even when he had no great faith 
in the oppressed — whether English, or Italians, or Greeks. 

Byron regarded the established dynasties of the continent with 
a sincere Iiatred. He talks of the "more than infernal tyranny" 
of the House of Austria. To his fancy, as to Shelley's, New Eng- 
land is the star of the future. Attracted by a strength or rather 
force of character akin to his own, he worshipped Napoleon, even 
when driven to confess that "the hero had sunk into a king." He 
lamented his overthrow; but, above all, that he was beaten l)y 
"three stupid, legitimate old dynasty boobies of regular sover- 
eigns." " I write in ipecacuanha that the Bourbons are restored." 
" What right have we to prescribe laws to France ? Here we are 
retrograding to the dull, stupid old system, balance of Europe — 
poising straws on kings' noses, instead of wringing them off.'' 
" The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like 
water, and tears like mist; but the people will conquer in the end. 
I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it." " Give me a republic. 



120 BYRON. 

Look into the history of the earth — Rome, Greece, Venice, Hol- 
land, France, America, our too short Commonwealtli — and com- 
pare it with what they did under masters." 

His serious political verses are all in the strain of the lines on 
Wellino:ton — 



'ea' 



" Never had mortal man such opportunity — 
Except Napoleon — or abused it more ; 
You might have freed fallen Europe from the unity 
Of tyrants, and been blessed from shore to shore." 

An enthusiasm for Italy, which survived many disappointments, 
dictated some of the most impressive passages of his Harold, and 
inspired tlie La7ne7it of Tasso and the Ode on Venice. The Proph' 
ecy of Dante contains much that has since proved prophetic — 

" What is there wanting, then, to set thee free, 
And show thy beauty in its fullest light ? 
To make the Alps impassable; and we, 
Her sons, may do this with one deed — Unite I ""^ 

His letters reiterate the same idea, in language even more em- 
phatic. " It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be Hb- 
erated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object — the very 
poetry of politics : only think — a free Italy ! " Byron acted on his 
assertion that a man ought to do more for society than write verses. 
Mistrusting its leaders, and detesting the wretched lazzaroni, who 
" would have betrayed themselves and all the world," he yet threw 
himself heart and soul into the insurrection of 1820, saying, 
" Whatever I can do by money, means, or person, I will venture 
freely for their freedom." He joined the secret society of the 
Carbonari, wrote an address to the Liberal government set up in 
Naples, supplied arms and a refuge in his house, which he was 
prepared to convert into a fortress. In February, 1821, on the 
rout of the Neapolitans by the Austrians, the conspiracy was 
crushed. Byron, who " had always an idea that it would be 
bungled," expressed his fear that the country would be thrown 
back for 500 years into barbarism, and the Countess Guiccioli con- 
fessed with tears that the Italians must return to composing and 
strumming operatic airs. Carbonarism having collapsed, it of 
course made way for a reaction ; but the encouragement and coun- 
tenance of the English poet and peer helped to keep alive the 
smouldering fire that Mazzini fanned into a flame, till Cav^ur 
turned it to a practical purpose, and the dreams of the idealist's of 
1820 were finally realized. 

On the failure of the luckless conspiracy, Byron naturally 
betook himself to history, speculation, satire, and ideas of a jour- 
nalistic propaganda , but all through his mind was turning to the 
renewal of the action which was his destiny. " If 1 live ten years 
longer," he writes in 1822, "you will see that it is not all over with 
me. I don't mean in literature, for that is nothing — and I do not 



BYRON. 121 

think it was my vocation ; but I shall do something." The Greek 
war of hberation opened a new field for the exercise of his indom- 
itable energy. This romantic struggle, begun in April, 1821, was 
carried on for two years with such remarkable success, that at the 
close of 1822 Greece was beginning to be recognised as an inde- 
pendent state : but in the following months the tide seemed to 
turn ; dissensions broke out among the leaders, the spirit of intrigue 
seemed to stifle patriotism, and the energies of the insurgents were 
hampered for want of the sinews of war. There was a danger of 
the movement being starved out, and the committee of London 
sympathisers — of which the poet's intimate friend and frequent 
correspondent, Mr. Douglas Kinnaird, and Captain Blaquiere, 
were leading promoters — was impressed with the necessity of pro- 
curing funds in support of the cause. With a view to this it 
seemed of consequence to attach to it some shining name, and 
men's thoughts almost inevitably turned to Byron. No other 
Englishman seemed so fit to be associated with the enteri)nse as 
the warlike poet, who had twelve years before linked his fame to 
that of "grey Marathon" and "Athena's tower," and, more 
recently, immortalised the isles on which he cast so many a long- 
ing glance. Hobhouse broke the subject to him early in the 
spnngof 1823: the committee opened communications in April. 
After hesitating through May, in June Byron consented to meet 
Blaquiere at Zante, and, on hearing the results of the captain's ex- 
pedition to the Morea, to decide on future steps. His share in 
this enterprise has been assigned to purely personal and compar- 
atively mean motives.* He was, it is said, disgusted witii his peri- 
odical, sick of his editor, tired of his mistress, and bent on any 
change, from China to Peru, that would give him a new theatre for 
display. One grows weary of the perpetual half-truths of inveter- 
ate detraction. It is granted that Byron was restless, vain, impe- 
rious, never did anything without a desire to shine in the doing of 
it, and was to a great degree the slave of circumstances. Had the 
Liberal proved a lamp to the nations, instead of a mere " red flag 
flaunted in the face of John Bull," he might have cast anchor at 
Genoa ; but the whole drift of his work and life demonstrates that 
he was capable on occasion of merging himself in what he con- 
ceived to be great causes, especially in their evil days. Of the 
Hunts he may have had enough ; but the invidious statement 
about La Guiccioli has no foundation, other than a somewhat ran- 
dom remark of Shelley, and the fact that he left her nothing in his 
will. It is distinctly ascertained that she expressly prohibited him 
from doing so : they continued to correspond to the last, and her 
affectionate, though unreadable, reminiscences are sufficient proof 
that she at no time considered herself to be neglected, injured, or 
aggrieved. 

Byron, indeed, left Italy in an unsettled state of mind : he spoke 
of returning in a few months, and as the period for his departure 
approached, became more and more irresolute. A presentiment 
of his death seemed to brood over a mind always superstitious, 



132 BYRON. 

though never fanatical. Shortly before his own departure, the 
Blessingtons were preparing to leave Genoa for England. On the 
evening of his farewell call he began to speak of his voyage with 
despondency, saying, " Here we are all now together ; but when 
and where shall we meet again ! I have a sort of boding that we 
see each other for the last time, as something tells me I shall never 
again return from Greece: " after which remark he leant his head 
Oil the sofa, and burst into one of his hysterical fits of tears. The 
next week was given to preparations for an expedition, which, en- 
tered on with mingled motives — sentimental, personal, public — 
became more real and earnest to Byron at every step he took. He 
knew all the vices of the " hereditary bondsmen " among whom he 
was going, and went among them with yet unquenched aspirations, 
but with the bridle of discipline in his hand, resolved to pave the 
way towards the nation becoming better, by devoting himself to 
making it free. 

On the morning of July 14 (1823) he embarked in the brig 
"Hercules," with Trelawny ; Count Pietro Gamba, who remained 
with him to the last ; Bruno, a young Italian doctor ; Scott, the 
captain of the vessel, and eight servants, including Fletcher; be- 
sides the crew. They had on board two guns, with other arms 
and ammunition, five horses, an ample supply of medicines, with 
50,000 Spanish dollars in coin and bills. The start was inauspi- 
cious. A violent squall drove them back to port, and in the 
course of a last ride with Gamba to Albaro, Byron asked, " Where 
shall we be in a year ? " On the same day of the same month of 
1824 he was carried to the tomb of his ancestors. They again set 
sail on the following evening, and in five days reached Leghorn, 
where the poet received a salutation in verse, addressed to him by 
Goethe, and replied to it. Here Mr. Hamilton Brown, a Scotch 
gentleman with considerable knowledge of Greek affairs, joined 
the party, and induced them to change their course to Cephalonia, 
for the purpose of obtaining the advice and assistance of the 
English resident. Colonel Napier. The poet occupied himself 
during the voyage mainly in reading — among other books, Scott's 
Life of Swift, Grimm's Corresponde?tce, La Rochefoucauld, and 
Las Casas — and watching the classic or historic shores which they 
^kirted, especially noting Elba. Soracte, the Straits of Messina, 
nd Etna. In passing Stromboli he said to Trelawny, " You will 
see this scene in a fifth canto of Childe Harold?'' On his com- 
panions suggesting that he should write some verses on the spot, 
he tried to do so, but threw them away, with the remark, " I cannot 
write poetry at will, as you smoke tobacco." Trelawny confesses 
that he was never on shipboard with a better companion, and that 
a severer test of good-fellowship it is impossible to apply. To- 
gether they shot at gulls or empty bottles, and swam every morn- 
ing in the sea. Early in August they reached their destination. 
Coming-in sight of the Morea, the poet said to Trelawny, " I feel 
as if the eleven long years of bitterness I have passed through 
since I was here were taken from my shoulders, and I was scudding 
through the Greek Archipelago with old Bathurst in his frigate." 



BYRON. 



123 



Byron remained at or about Cephalonia till the close of the year. 
Not long after his arrival he made an excursion to Ithaca, and, 
visiting the monastery at Vathi, was received by the abbot with 
great ceremony, which, in a fit of irritation, brought on by a tire- 
some ride on a mule, he returned with unusual discourtesy; but 
next morning, on his giving a donation to their alms-box, he was 
dismissed with the blessing of the monks. " If this isle were 
mine," he declared on his way back, " I would break my staff and 
bury my book." A little later. Brown and Trelawny being sent off 
with letters to the provisional government, the former returned 
with some Greek emissaries to London to negociate a loan ; the 
latter attached himself to Odysseus, the chief of the republican 
party at Athens, and never again saw Byron alive. The poet, after 
spending a month on board the " Hercules," dismissed the vessel, 
and hired a house for Gamba and himself at Metaxata, a healthy 
village about four miles from the capital of the island. Meanwhile, 
Blaqui^re, neglecting his appointment at Zante, had gone to Corfu, 
and thence to England. Colonel Napier being absent from Cepha- 
lonia, Byron had some pleasant social intercourse with his deputy, 
but, unable to get from him any authoritative information, was left 
without advice, to be besieged by letters and messages from the 
factions. Among these there were brought to him hints that the 
Greeks wanted a king, and he is reported to have said, "If they 
make me the offer, I will perhaps not reject it." 

The position would doubtless have been acceptable to a man 
who never — amid his many self-deceptions — affected to deny that 
he was ambitious ; and who can say what might not have resulted 
for Greece, had the poet lived to add lustre to her crown ? In the 
meantime, while faring more frugally than a day-labourer, he yet 
surrounded himself with a show of royal state, had his servants 
armed with gilt helmets, and gathered around him a body-guard of 
Suliotes. These wild mercenaries becoming turbulent, he was 
obliged to despatch them to Mesolonghi, then threatened with siege 
by the Turks and anxiously waiting relief. During his residence 
at Cephalonia, Byron was gratified by the interest evinced in him 
by the English residents. Among these the physician. Dr. Ken- 
nedy, a worthy Scotchman, who imagined himself to be a theologian 
with a genius for conversation, was conducting a series of religious 
meetings at Argostoli.when the poet expressed a wish to be present 
at one of them. After listening, it is said, to a set of discourses 
that occupied the greater part of twelve hours, he seems, for one 
reason or another, to have felt called on to enter the lists, and 
found himself involved in the series of controversial dialogues 
afterwards published in a substantial book. This volume, inter- 
esting in several respects, is one of the most charming examples 
of unconscious irony in the language, and it is matter of regret 
that our space does not admit of the abridgment of several of its 
pages . They bear testimony, on the one hand, to Byron's capability 
of patience, and frequent sweetness of temper under trial ; oij the 
- i/ier, to Kennedy's utter want of humour, and to his courageous 



124 



B YROM 



honesty. The curiously confronted interlocutors, in the course of 
the missionary and subsequent private meetings, ran over most of 
the ground debated betvi^een opponents and apologists of the Cal- 
vinistic faith, which Kennedy upheld without stint. The Conver- 
sations add little to what we already know of Byron's religious 
opinions ; nor is it easy to say where he ceases to be serious and 
begins to banter, or vice versa. He evidently wished to show that 
in argument he was good at fence, and could handle a theologian 
as skilfully as a foil. At the same time he wished, if possible, 
though, as appears, in vain, to get some light on a subject with 
regard to which in his graver moods he was often exercised. On 
some points he is explicit. He makes an unequivocal protest 
against the doctrines of eternal punishment and infant damnation, 
saying that if the rest of mankind were to be damned, he " would 
rather keep them company than creep into heaven alone." On 
questions of inspiration, and the deeper problems of human life, he 
is less distinct, being naturally inclined to a speculative necessita- 
rianism, and disposed to admit original depravity ; but he did not 
see his way out of the maze through the Atonement, and held that 
prayer had only significance as a devotional affection of the heart. 
Byron showed a remarkable familiarity with the Scriptures, and with 
parts of Barrow, Chillingworth, and Stillingfleet ; but on Kennedy's 
lending, for his edification, Boston's Fourfold State, he returned it 
with the remark that it was too deep for him. On another occasion 
he said, " Do you know I am nearly reconciled to St. Paul, for he 
says there is no difference between the Jews and the Greeks ? and 
I am exactly of the same opinion, for the character of both is 
equally vile." The good Scotchman's religious self-confidence is 
throughout free from intellectual pride ; and his own confession, 
" This time I suspect his lordship had the best of it," might per- 
haps be applied to the whole discussion. 

Critics who have little history and less war have been accus- 
tomed to attribute Byron's lingering at Cephalonia to indolence 
and indecision ; they write as if he ought, on landing on Greek soil, 
to have put himself at the head of an army and stormed Constanti- 
nople. Those who know more confess that the delay was deliber- 
ate, and that it was judicious. The Hellenic uprising was animated 
by the spirit of a " lion after slumber," but it had the heads of a 
Hydra hissing and tearing at one another. The chiefs who de- 
fended the country by their arms compromised her by their argu- 
ments, and some of her best fighters were little better than pirates 
and bandits. Greece was a prey to factions — republican, mon- 
archic, aristocratic — representing naval, military, and territorial in- 
terests, and each beset by the adventurers who flock round every 
movement, only representing their own. During the first two years 
of success they were held in embryo ; during the later years oi dis- 
aster, terminated by the allies at Navarino, they were buried ; dur- 
ing the interlude of Byron's residence, when the foes were like 
hounds in the leash, waiting for a renewal of the struggle, they 
were rampant. Had he joined any one of them he would have 



BYRON. 



125 



degraded himself to the level of a mere condottiere, and helped to 
betray the common cause. Beset by solicitations to go to Athens, 
to the Morea, to Acarnania, he resolutely held apart, biding his 
time, collecting information, making himself known as a man of 
affairs, endeavouring to conciliate rival claimants for pension or 
place, and carefully watching the tide of war. Numerous anecdotes 
of the period relate to acts of public or private benevolence, which 
endeared him to the population of the island ; but he was on 
the alert against being fleeced or robbed. " The bulk of the Eng- 
lish," writes Colonel Napier, '• came expecting to find the Pelopon- 
nesus filled with Plutarch's men, and returned thinking the inhab- 
itants of Newgate more moral. Lord Byron judged tlie Greeks 
fairly, and knew that allowance must be made for emancipated 
slaves." Among other incidents we hear of his passing a group, 
who were " shrieking and howling as in Ireland " over some men 
buried in the fall of a bank ; he snatched a spade, began to dig, 
and threatened to horsewhip the peasants unless they followed his 
example. On November 30 he despatched to the central govern- 
ment a remarkable state paper, in which he dwells on the fatal 
calamity of a civil war, and says that, unless union and order are es- 
tablished, all hopes of a loan — which, being every day more urgent, 
he was in letters to England constantly pressing — are at an end. 
" I desire," he concluded, "the wellbeing of Greece, and nothing 
else. I will do all I can to secure it ; but I will never consent that 
the English public be deceived as to the real state of affairs. You 
have fought gloriously ; act honourably towards your fellow-citizens 
and the world, and it will then no more be said, as has been re- 
peated for two thousand years with the Roman historians, that 
Philopoemen was the last of the Grecians." 

Prince Alexander Mavrocordatos — the most prominent of the 
practical patriotic leaders — having been deposed from the presi- 
dency, was sent to regulate the affairs of Western Greece, and was 
now on his way with a fleet to relieve Mesolonghi, in attempting 
which the brave Marco Bozzaris had previously fallen. In a letter, 
opening communication with a man for whom he always enter- 
tained a high esteem, Byron writes, " Colonel Stanhope has ar- 
rived from London, charged by our committee to act in concert 
with me. . . . Greece is at present placed between three measures 
— either to ^reconquer her liberty, to become a dependence of the 
sovereigns of Europe, or to return to a Turkish province. She 
has the choice only of these three alternatives. Civil war is but a 
road that leads to the two latter." 

At length the long-looked-for fleet arrived, and the Turkish 
squadron, with the loss of a treasure- ship, retired up the Gulf of 
Lepanto. Mavrocordatos, on entering Mesolonghi, lost no time in 
inviting the poet to join him, and placed a brig at his disposal, add- 
ing, " I need not tell you to what a pitch your presence is desired 
by everybody, or what a prosperous direction it will give to all our 
affairs. Your counsels will be listened to like oracles." 

At the same date Stanhope writes, " The people in the streets 



J 26 BYRON. 

are looking forward to his lordship's arrival as they would to the 
coming of the Messiah." Byron was unable to start in the ship 
sent for him; but in spite of medical warnings, a few days later, 
/. <?., December 28, he embarked in a small fast-sailing sloop called a 
mistico, while the servants and baggage were stowed in another and 
larger vessel under the charge of Count Gamba. From Gamba's 
graphic account of the voyage we may take the foUov/ing : "We 
sailed together till after ten at night; the wind favourable, a clear 
sky, the air fresh, but not sharp. Our sailors sang alternately pa- 
triotic songs, monotonous indeed, but to persons in our situation 
extremely touching, and we took part in them. We were all, but 
Lord Byron particularly, in excellent spirits. The mistico sailed 
the fastest. When tlie waves divided us, and our voices could no 
longer reach each other, we made signals by firing pistols and 
carbines. To-morrow we meet at Mesolonghi — to-morrow. Thus, 
full of confidence and spirits, we sailed along. At twelve we were 
out of sight of each other." 

Byron's vessel, separated from her consort, came into the close 
proximity of a Turkish frigate, and had to take refuge among the 
Scrofes' rocks. Emerging thence, he attained a small seaport of 
Acarnania, called Dragomestri, whence sallying forth on the 2nd 
of January under the convoy of some Greek gunboats, he was 
nearly wrecked. On the 4th Byron made, when violently heated, 
an imprudent plunge in the sea, and was never afterwards free 
from a pain in his bones. On the 5th he arrived at Mesolonghi, 
and was received with salvoes of musketry and music. Gamba 
was waiting him. His vessel, the " Bom&arda," had been taken 
by the Ottoman frigate, but the captain of the latter, recognising 
the Count as having formerly saved his life in the Black Sea, made 
interest in his behalf with Yussuf Pasha and Patras, and obtained 
his discharge. In recompense, the poet subsequently sent to the 
Pasha some Turkish prisoners, with a letter requesting him to en- 
deavour to mitigate the inhumanities of the war. B3'ron brought 
to the Greeks at Mesolonghi the 4000/. of his personal loan (ap- 
plied, in the first place, to defraying the expenses of the fleet,) 
with the spell of his name and presence. He was shortly after- 
wards appointed to the command of the intended expedition against 
Lepanto, and, with this view, again took into his pay five hundred 
Suliotes. An approaching general assembly to organise the forces 
of the West had brought together a modey crew, destitute, discon- 
tented, and more likely to wage war upon each other than on their 
enemies. Byron's closest associates during the ensuing months 
were the engineer Parry, an energetic artilleryman ; " extremely ac- 
tive, and of strong practical talents," who had travelled in Amer- 
ica, and Colonel Stanhope (afterwards Lord Harrington), equally 
with himself devoted to the emancipation of Greece,- but at variance 
about the means of achieving it. Stanhope, a moral enthusiast of 
the stamp of Kennedy, beset by the fallacy of religious missions, 
wished to cover the Morea with Wesleyan tracts, and liberate the 
country by the agency of the press. He had imported a converted 



BYRON. 127 

blacksmith, with a cargo of Bibles, types, and paper, who on 20/. 
a year undertook to accomplish the reform. Byron, backed by 
the good sense of Mavrocordatos, proposed to make cartridges of 
the tracts, and small shot of the type ; he did not think that the 
turbulent tribes were ripe for freedom of the press, and had begun 
to regard Republicanism itself as of secondary moment. The dis- 
putant allies m the common cause occupied each a flat of the same 
small house ; the soldier by profession was bent on writing the 
'lurks down, the poet on fighting them down, holding that " the 
work of the sword must precede that of the pen, and "that camps 
must be the training-schools of freedom." Their altercations were 
sometimes fierce — '• Despot ! " cried Stanhope, " after professing 
liberal principles from boyhood, you, when called to act, prove 
yourself a Turk." "Radical!" retorted Byron, "if I had held 
up my finger I could have crushed your press " — but this did not 
prevent the recognition by each of them of the excellent qualities 
of the other. 

Ultimately Stanhope went to Athens, and allied himself with 
Trelawny and Odysseus and the party of the Left. Nothing can 
be more statesmanlike than some of Byron's papers of this and the 
immediately preceding period, nothing more admirable than the 
spirit which inspires them. He had come into the heart of a rev- 
olution, exposed to the same perils as those which had wrecked 
the similar movement in Italv- Neither trusting too much nordis- 
trusting too much, with a clear head and a good will he set about 
enforcing a series of excellent measures. From first to last he 
was engaged in denouncing dissension, in advocating unity, in 
doing everything that man could do to concentrate and utilise the 
disorderly elements with which he had to work. He occupied 
himself in repairing fortifications, managing ships, restraining 
licence, promoting courtesy between the foes, and regulating the 
disposal of the sinews of war. 

On the morning of the 22nd of January, his last birthday, he 
came from his room to Stanhope's, and said, smiling, " You were 
complaining that I never write any poetry now," and read the 
familiar stanzas beginning — 

" 'Tis time this heart should be unmoved," 

and ending- 

*• Seek out — less often sought than found — 
A soldier's grave, for thee the best ; 
Then look around, and choose thy ground, 
And take thy rest." 

High thoughts, high resolves ; but the brain that was overtasked, 
and the frame that was outworn, would be tasked and worn little 
longer. The lamp of a life that had burnt too fiercely was flicker- 
ing to its close. " If we are not taken off with the sword," he 
writes on February 5, " we are like to march off with an ague in 



128 byron: 

this mud basket ; and, to conclude with a very bad pun, better 
martially than ma^sh-ally. The dykes of Holland when broken 
down are the deserts of Arabia, in comparison with Mesolonghi." 
In April, when it was too late, Stanhope wrote from Salona, in 
Phocis, imploring him not to sacrifice health, and perhaps life, "in 
that bog." 

Byron's house stood in the midst of the exhalations of a muddy 
creek, and his natural irritability was increased by a more than 
usually long ascetic regimen. From the day of his arrival in 
Greece he discarded animal food, and lived mainly on toast, vege- 
tables, and cheese, olives and light wine, at the rate of forty paras a 
day. In spite of his strength of purpose, his temper was not 
always proof against the rapacity and turbulence by which he was 
surrounded. About the middle of February, when the artillery 
had been got into readiness for the attack on Lepanto — the north- 
ern, as Patras was the southern, gate of the gulf, still in the hands 
of the Turks — the expedition was thrown back by an unexpected 
rising of the Suliotes. These peculiarly froward Greeks, chronic- 
ally seditious by nature, were on this occasion, as afterwards ap- 
peared, stirred up by emissaries of Colocatroni, who, though as- 
suming the position of the rival of Mavrocordatos, was simply a 
brigand on a large scale in the Morea. Exasperation at this mutiny, 
and the vexation of having to abandon a cherished scheme, seem to 
have been the immediately provoking causes of a violent convulsive 
fit which, on the evening of the ifth, attacked the poet, and en- 
dangered his life. Next day he was better, but complained of weight 
in the head ; and the doctors applying leeches too close to the 
temporal artery, he was bled till he fainted. And now occurred 
the last of those striking incidents so frequent in his life, in refer- 
ence to which we may quote the joint testimony of two witnesses. 
Colonel Stanhope writes, " Soon after this dreadful paroxysm, 
when he was lying on his sick-i)ed, with his whole nervous system 
completely shaken, the mutinous Suliotes, covered with dirt and 
spleodid attires, broke into his apartment, brandishing their costly 
arms and loudly demanding their rigiits. Lord Byron, electrified 
by this unexpected act, seemed to recover from his sickness ; and 
the more the Suliotes raged the more his calm courage triumphed. 
The scene was truly sublime." " It is impossible,"^ says Count 
Gamba, " to do justice to the coolness and magnanimity which he 
displaved upon every trying occasion. Upon trifling occasions he 
was certainly irritable ; but the aspect of danger calmed him in an 
instant, and restored him the free exercise of all the powers of his 
noble nature. A more undaunted man in the hour of peril never 
breathed." A few days later, the riot being renewed, the disorderly 
crew were, on payment of their arrears, finally dismissed; but 
several of the Eng'lish artificers under Parry left about the same 
time, in fear of their lives. 

On the 4th, the last of the long list of Byron's letters to Moore 
resents, with some bitterness, the hasty acceptance of a rumour 
taat he had been quietly writing Don Juan in some Ionian island. 



BYRON. • 129 

At the same date he writes to Kennedy, " I am not unaware of the 
precarious state of my health. But it is proper 1 should remain in 
Greece, and it were better to die doing something than nothing." 
Visions of enlisting Europe and America on behalf of the establish- 
ment of a new state, that might in course of time develop itself over 
the realm of Alexander, floated and gleamed in his fancy ; but in 
his practical daily procedure the poet took as his text the motto 
"festina lente," insisted on solid ground under his feet, and had no 
notion of sailing balloons over the sea. With this view he discour- 
aged Stanhope's philanthropic and propagandist paper, the Tele- 
gtapho. TiXiA disparaged Dr. Mayer, its Swiss editor, saying, "Of 
all petty tyrants he is one of the pettiest, as are most demagogues." 
Byron had none of the Sclavonic leanings, and almost personal 
hatred of Ottoman rule, of some of our statesmen ; but he saw on 
what side lay the forces and the hopes of the future. " I cannot cal- 
culate," he said to Gamba, during one of their latest rides together, 
"to what a height Greece may rise. Hitherto it has been a sub- 
ject for the hymns and elegies of fanatics and enthusiasts ; but now 
it will draw the attention of the politician. ... At present there is 
little difference, in many respects, between Greeks and Turks, nor 
could there be ; but the latter must, in the commuii course of events, 
decline in power; and the former must as inevitably become 
better. . . . The English Government deceived itself at first in 
thinking it possible to maintain the Turkish Empire in its integrity; 
but it cannot be done — that unwieldy mass it already putrified, and 
must dissolve. If anything like an equilibrium is to be upheld, 
Greece must be supported." These words have been well char- 
acterised as prophetic. During this time Byron rallied in health, 
and displayed much of his old spirit, vivacity, and humour, 'took 
part in such of his favou»-ite amusements as circumstances ad- 
mitted, fencing, shooting, riding, and playing with his pet dog Lion. 
The last of his recorded practical jokes is his rolling about cannon- 
balls, and shaking the rafters, to frighten Parry in the room below 
with the dread of an earthquake. 

Towards the close of the month, after being solicited to ac- 
company Mavrocordatos to share the governorship of the Morea, 
he made an appointment to meet Colonel Stanhope and Odysseus 
at Salona, but was prevented from keeping it by violent floods 
which blocked up the communication. On the 30th he was pre- 
sented with the freedom of the city of Mesolonghi. On the 3rd of 
.April he intervened to prevent an Italian private, guilty of theft, 
frorn being flogged by order of some German officers. On the 9th, 
exhilarated by a letter from Mrs. Leigh with good accounts of her 
own and Ada's health, he took a long ride with Gamba and a few 
of the remaining Suliotes, and after being violently heated, and then 
drenched in a heavy shower, persisted in returning home in a boat, 
remarking witli a laugh, in answer to remonstrance, " I should 
make a pretty soldier If I were to care for such a trifle." It soon 
became apparent that he had caught his death. Almost imme- 
diately on his return he was seired with shiverlngs and violent pain. 



130 • BYRON. 

The next day he rose as usual, and had his last ride in the olive 
woods. On the nth a rheumatic fever set in. On the 14th, 
Bruno's skill being exhausted, it was proposed to call Dr. Thomas 
from Zante, but a hurricane prevented any ship being sent. On 
the 15th, another physician, Mr. Milligen, suggested bleeding to 
allay the fever, but Byron held out against it, quoting Dr. Reid to 
the effect that "less slaughter is effected by tiie lance than the 
lancet — that minute instrument of mighty mischief ; " and saying to 
Bruno, " If my hour is come I shiill die, whether I lose my blood 
or keep it." Next morning Milligen induced him to yield, by a 
suggestion of the possible loss of his reason. Throwing out his 
arm, he cried, "There! you are, I see, a d — d set of butchers. 
Take away as much blood as you like, and have done with it." 
The remedy, repeated on the following day with blistering, was 
either too late or ill-advised. On the i8th he saw more doctors, 
but was manifestly sinking, amid the tears and lamentations of at- 
tendants who could not understand each other's language. In his 
last hours his delirium bore him to the field of arms. He fancied 
he was leading the attack on Lepanto, and was heard exclaiming, 
"Forwards! forwards! follow me!" Who is not reminded of 
another death-bed, not remote in time from his, and the Tete 
d^art/i^e of the great Emperor who with the great Poet divided the 
wonder of Europe ? The stormy vision passed, and his thoughts 
reverted home. "Go to my sister," he faltered out to Fletcher ; 
" tell her — go to Lady Byron — you will see her, and say " — nothing 
more could be heard but broken ejaculations : " Augusta — Ada — 
my sister, my child. lo lascio qualche cosa di caro nel mondo. 
For the rest, I am content to die." At six on the evening of the 
1 8th he uttered his last words, " A^'i ijs w xaOsbdsu ; " and on the 
19th he passed away. 

Never, perhaps, was there such a national lamentation. By 
order of Mavrocordatos, thirty-seven guns — one for each year of 
the poet's life — were fired from the battery, and answered by the 
Turks from Patras with an exultant volley. All offices, tribunals, 
and shops were shut, and a general mourning for twenty-one days pro- 
claimed. Stanhope wrote, on hearing the news, " England has lost 
her brightest genius — Greece her noblest friend;" and Trelawny, 
on coming to Mesolonghi, heard nothing in the streets but " Byron 
is dead ! " like a bell tolling through the silence and the gloom. 
Intending contributors to the cause of Greece turned back when 
they heard the tidings, that seemed to them to mean she was head- 
less. Her cities contended for the body, as of old for the birth of 
a poet. Athens wished him to rest in the Temple of Theseus. 
The funeral service was performed at Mesolonghi. But on the 2nd 
of May the embalmed remains left Zante, and on the 29th arrived 
in the Downs. His relatives applied for permission to have them 
interred in Westminster Abbey, but it was refused ; and on the 
i6th July they were conveyed to the village church of Hucknall. 



BYRON. 



13* 



CHAPTER XI. 

CHARACTERISTICS, AND PLACE IN LITERATURE. 

Lord Jeffrey at the close of a once-famous review quaintly 
laments : "The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better 
than lumber, and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, and the 
fantastical emphasis oL Wordsworth, and the plebeian pathos of 
Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our vision. Tiie novels 
of Scott have put out his poetry, and the blazing star of Byron 
himself is receding from its place of prid^." Of the poets of the 
early part of this century Lord John Russell thought Byron the 
greatest; then Scott; then Moore. "Such an opinion," wrote a 
A'<3:/w««/ reviewer, in i860, " is not worth a refutation ; we only 
smile at it." Nothing in the history of literature is more curious 
than the shifting of the standard of excellence, which so perplexes 
criticism. But the most remarkable feature of the matter is the 
frequent return to power of the once discarded potentates. Byron 
is resuming his place : his spirit has come again to our atmos- 
phere ; and every budding critic, as in 1820, feels called on to pro- 
nounce a verdict on his genius and character. The present times 
are, in- many respects, an aftermath of the first quarter of tlie 
century which was an era of revolt, of doubt, of storm. Tliere 
succeeded an era of exhaustion, of quiescence, of reflection. Tlie 
first years of the third quarter saw a revival of turbulence and 
agitation; and, more than our fathers, we are inclined to sym- 
pathise with our grandfathers. Macaulay has popularised the 
story of the change of literary dynasty which in our island marked 
the close of the last, and the first two decades of the present, 
hundred years. 

The corresponding artistic revolt on the continent was closely 
connected with changes in the political world. The originators of 
the romantic literature in Italy, for the most part, died in Spiel- 
berg or in exile. The same revolution which levelled the Bastille, 
and converted Versailles and the Trianon — the classic school m 
stone and terrace — into a moral Herculaneum and Pompeii, drove 
the models of the so-called Augustan ages into a museum of 
antiquarians. In our own country, the movement initiated by 
Chatterton, Cowper, and Burns was carried out by two classes of 
great writers. They agreed In opposing freedom to formality ; in 
substituting for the old new aims and methods ; in preferring a 



132 



BYRON. 



grain of mother wit to a peck of clerisy. They broke with the old 
school, as Protestantism broke with the old Church ; but, like the 
sects, they separated again. Wordsworth, Soiithey, and Coleridge, 
while refusing to acknowledge the literary precedents of the past, 
submitted themselves to a self-imposed law. The partialities of 
their maturity were towards things settled and regulated; their 
favourite virtues, endurance and humility ; their conformity to 
established institutions was the basis of a new Conservatism. The 
others were the Radicals of the movement : they practically ac- 
knowledged no law but their own inspiration. Dissatisfied with the 
existing order, their sympathies were with strong will and passion 
and defiant independence. These found their master-types in 
Shelley and in Byron. 

A reaction is always an extreme. Lollards, Puritans, Coven- 
anters were in some respects nauseous antidotes to ecclesiastical 
corruption. The ruins of the Scotch cathedrals and of the French 
nobility are warnings at once against the excess that provokes and 
the excess that avenges. The revolt against the ancien rdgitne in 
letters made possible the Ode that is the high-tide mark of modern 
English inspiration, but it was parodied in page on page of maund- 
ering rusticity. Byron saw the danger, but was borne headlong by 
the rapids. Hence the anomalous contrast between his theories 
and his performance. Both Wordsworth and Byron were bitten by 
Rousseau ; but the former is, at furthest, a Girondin. The latter, 
acting like Danton on the motto " L'audace, I'audace, toujours 
I'audace," sighs after Henri (2uatre et Gabri^lle. There is more 
of the spirit of tlie French Revolution in Don yuan than in all the 
works of tlie author's contemporaries; but his criticism is that of 
Boileau, and when deliberate is generally absurd. H i never re- 
cognised the meaning of the artistic movement of liis age, and 
overvalued those of his works which the Unities helped to destroy. 
He hailed Gifford as his Magnus Apollo, and put Rogers next to 
Scott in his comical pyramid. " Chaucer," he writes, " I think 
obscene and contemptible." He could see no merit in Spenser, 
preferred Tasso to Milton, and called the old English dramatists 
" mad and turbid mountebanks." In the same spirit he writes: 
" In the time of Pope it was all Horace ; now it is all Claudian." 
He saw — what fanatics had begun to deny — that Pope was a great 
writer, and the " angel of reasonableness," tlie strong common 
sense of both, was a link between thein ; but the expressions he uses 
during his controversy with Bowles look like jests, till we are con- 
vinced of his earnestness by his anger. " Neither time, nor distance, 
nor grief, nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is 
the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and 
of all stages of existence. . . . Your whole generation are not 
worth a canto of the Dunciad, or anytliing that is his." All the 
while he was himself writing prose and verse, in grasp, if not in 
vigour as far beyond the stretch of Pope, as Pope is in " worth and 
wit and sense " removed above his mimics. The point of the par- 
adox is not merely that he deserted, but that he sometimes imi- 



• BYRON. 133 

tated his model, and when he did so, failed. Macaulay's judg- 
ment, that " personal taste led him to the eighteenth century, thirst 
for praise to the nineteenth," is quite at fault. There can be no 
doubt that Byron loved praise as much as he affected to despise 
it. His note, on reading the Quarterly on his dramas, " I am the 
most unpopular man in England," is like the cry of a child 
under chastisement ; but he had little affinity, moral or artistic, 
with the spirit of our so-called Augustans, and his determination 
to admire them was itself rebellious. Again we are reminded of 
' his phrase, *■ I am of the opposition." His vanity and pride were 
perpetually struggling for the mastery, and though he thirsted for 
popularity he was bent on compelling it ; so he warre>l withthe 
literary impulse of which he was the child. 

Byron has no relation to the master-minds whose works reflect 
a nation or an era, and who keep their own secrets. His verse and 
prose is alike biographical, and the inequalities of his style are 
those of his career. He lived in a glass case, and could not hide 
himself by his habit of burning blue lights. He was too great to do 
violence to his nature, which was not great enough to bo really 
consistent. It was thus natural for him to pose as the spokesman of 
two ages — as a critic and as an author ; and of two orders of society 
— as a peer, and as a poet of revolt. Sincere in both, he could 
never forget the one character in the other. To the last he was an 
aristocrat in sentiment, a democrat in opinion. " Vulgarity," he 
writes, with a pithy half-truth, "is far worse than downright black- 
guardism ; for the latter comprehends wit, humour, and strong 
sense at all times, while the former is a sad abortive attempt at all 
things, signifying nothing." He could never reconcile himself to 
the English radicals ; and it has been acutely remarked that part 
of his final interest in Greece lay in the fact that he found it a 
country of classic memories, "where a man might be the champion 
of liberty without soiling himself in the arena." He owed much of 
his early influence to the fact of his moving in the circles of rank 
and fashion; but though himself steeped in the prejudices of caste, 
he struck at them at times with fatal force. Aristocracy is the in- 
dividual asserting a vital distinction between itself and " the muck 
o' the world." Byron's heroes all rebel against the associative 
tendency of the nineteenth century, they are self-worshippers at 
war with society ; but most of them come to bad ends. He ma- 
ligned himself in those caricatures, and has given more of himself 
in describing one whom with special significance we call a brother 
poet. "Allen," he writes in 1813, "has lent me a quantity of 
Burns's unpublished letters. .. .What an antithetical mind! — ten- 
derness, roughness — delicacy, coarseness — sentiment, sensuality — 
soaring and grovelling — dirt and deity — all mixed up in that one 
compound of inspired clay!" We have only to add to these an- 
titheses, in applying them with slight modification to the writer. 
Byron had, on occasion, more self-control than Burns, who yielded 
to every thirst or gust, and could never have lived the life of the 
soldier at Mcsolonghi ; but, partly owing to meanness, partly to a 



134 BYRON. 

sound instinct, his memory has been severely dealt with. The fact 
of his being a nobleman helped to make him famous, but it also 
helped to make him hated. No doubt it half spoiled him in making 
him a show ; and the circumstance has suggested the remark of a 
humourist, that it is as hard for a lord to be a perfect gentleman as 
for a camel to pass through the needle's eye. But it also exposed to 
the rancours of jealousy a man who had nearly everything but domes- 
tic happiness to excite that most corroding of literary passions; 
and when he got out of gear he became the quarry of Spenser's 
"blatant beast." On the other hand, Burns was, beneath his dis- ' 
gust at Ho y Fairs and Willies, sincerely reverential ; much of 
Don yuan would have seemed to him " an atheist's laugh," and — 
a more certain superiority — he was absolutely frank. 

Byron, like Pope, was given to playing monkey-like tricks, 
mostly harmless, but offensive to their victims. His peace of 
mind was dependent on what people would say of him, to a degree 
unusual even in the irritable race ; and when they spoke ill he was, 
again like Pope, essentially vindictive. The Bards and Reviewers 
beats about, where the lines to Atticus transfix with Philoctetes' 
arrows ; but they are due to a like impulse. Byron affected to 
contemn the world ; but, say what he would, he cared too much for 
it. He had a genuine love of solitude as an alternative ; but he 
could not subsist without society, and, Shelley tells us, wherever 
he went, became the nucleus of it. He sprang up again when 
flung to the earth, but he never attained to the disdain he desired. 

We find him at once munificent and careful about money; 
calmly asleep amid a crowd of trembling sailors, yet never going 
to ride without a nervous caution ; defying augury, yet seriously 
disturbed by a gipsy's prattle. He could be the most genial of 
comrades, the most considerate of masters, and he secured the de- 
votion of his servants, as of his friends ; but he was too overbear- 
ing to form many equal friendships, and apt to be ungenerous to 
his real rivals. His shifting attitude towards Lady Byron, his wav- 
ering purposes, his impulsive acts, are a part of the character we 
trace through all his life and work — a strange mixture of magnanim- 
ity and brutality, of laughter and tears, consistent in nothing but 
his passion and his pride, yet redeeming all his defects by his 
graces, and wearing a greatness that his errors can only half 
obscure. 

Alternately the idol and the horror of his contemporaries, Byron 
was, during his life, feared and respected as "the grand Napoleon 
of the realms of rhyme." His works were the events of the literary 
world. The cliief among them were translated into French, Ger- 
man, Italian, Danish, Polish, Russian, Spanish. On the publica- 
tion of Moore's Life, Lord Macaulay had no hesitation in referring 
to Byron "as the most celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth 
century." Nor have we now; but in the interval between 1840- 
1870 it was the fashion to talk of him as a sentimentalist, a 
romancer, a shallow wit, a nine days' wonder, a poet for " green 
unknowing youth." It was a reaction such as leads us to disestab- 



BYRON. 



135 



fish the heroes of our crude imaginations till we learn that to 
admire nothing is as sure a sign of immaturity as to admire every- 
thing. 

The weariness, if not disgust, induced by a throng of more than 
usually absurd imitators, enabled Mr. Carlyle, the poet's successor 
in literary influence, more effectively to lead the counter-revolt. 
" In my mind," writes this critic, in 1839, " Byron has been sinking 
at an accelerated rate for the last ten years, and has now reached 
a very low level. . . .His fame has been very great, but I do not see 
how it is to endure; neither does that make him great. No gen- 
uine productive thought was ever revealed by him to mankind. He 
taught me nothing that I had not again to forget." The refrain of 
Carlyle's advice during the most active years of his criticism was, 
" Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe." We do so, and find that 
the refrain of Goethe's advice in reference to Byron is — " Noc- 
turna versate manu, versate diurna." He urged Eckermnnn to 
study English that he might read him ; remarking, " A character of 
such eminence has never existed before, and probably will never 
come again. The beauty of Cain is such as we shall not see a sec- 
ond time in the world .... Byron issues from the sea-waves ever 
fresh. I did right to present him with that monument of love in 
Helena. I could not make use of any man as the representative 
of the modern poetic era except him, who is undoubtedly to be 
regarded as the greatest genius of our century." Again : "Tasso's 
epic has maintained its fame, but Byron is the burning bush 
which reduces the cedar of Lebanon to ashes.... The English 
may think of him as they please ; this is certain, they can show 
no (living) poet who is to be compared to him. . . .But he is too 
worldly. Contrast Macbeth and Beppo, where you are in a nefa- 
rious empirical world. On Eckermann's doubting " whether there 
is a gain for pure culture in Byron's work," Goethe conclusively 
replies, "There I must contradict you. The audacity and grand- 
eur of Byron must certainly tend towards culture. We should take 
care not to be always looking for it in the decidedly pure and 
moral. Everything that is great promotes cultivation, as soon as 
ive are aware of it." 

This verdict of the Olympian as against the verdict of the Titan 
\s interesting in itself, and as being the verdict of the whole con- 
tinental world of letters. "What," exclaims Castelar, "does 
Spain not owe to Byron ? From his mouth come our hopes and 
fears. He has baptized us with his blood. There is no one with 
whose being some song of his is not woven. His life is like a 
funeral torch over our graves." Mazzini takes up the same tune 
for Italy. Stendhal speaks of Byron's " ApoUonic power ; " and 
Sainte Beuve writes to the same intent, with some judicious 
caveats. M. Taine concludes his survey of the romantic move- 
ment with the remark : " In this splendid effort, the greatest are 
exhausted. One alone — Byron — attains the summit. He is so 
great and so English, that from him alone we shall learn more 
truths of his country and his age than from all the rest together." 



136 BYRON. 

Dr. EIze ranks the author of Harold and y^aji among the four 
greatest English poets, and claims for him the intellectual parent- 
age of Lamartine and Musset in France, of Espronceda in Spain, 
of Puschkin in Russia, with some modifications, of Heine in Ger- 
many, of Berchet and otiiers in Italy. So many voices of so vari- 
ous countries cannot be simply set aside : unless we wrap our- 
selves in an insolent insularism, we are liound at least to ask what 
is tlie meaning of tlieir concurrent testimony- Foreign judgments 
can manifestly have little weight on matters of form, and not one 
of the al)ove-mentioned critics is sufficiently alive to the egregious 
shortcomings which Bvron himself recognised. That he loses al- 
most nothing by translation is a compliment to the man, a dispar- 
agement to the artist. Scarce a page of his verse even aspires to 
perfection ; hardly a stanza will bear tlie minute word-by-word dis- 
section which only brings into clearer view the delicate touches o£ 
Keats or Tennyson ; his pictures with a big brush were never 
meant for the microscope. Here the contrast between his theo- 
retic worship of his idol and his own practice reaches a climax. 
If, as he professed to believe, ''the best poet is he who best exe- 
cutes his work," then he is hardly a poet at all. He is habitually 
rapid and slovenly; an improvisatore on the spot where his fancy 
is kindled, writing currente calamo, and disdaining the "art to 
blot." "I can never recast anytliing. I am like the tiger; if I 
miss the first spring, I go grumbling ijack to my jungle." He said 
to Medwin, " Blank verse is the most difficult, because every line 
must be good." Consequently, his own blank verse is always de- 
fective — sometimes execrai:)le. No one else — except, perhaps, 
Wordsworth — who could write so well, could also write so ill. 
This fact in Byron's cass seems due not to me?-e carelessnes.s, but 
to incapacity. Something seems to stand behind him, like the 
slave in the chariot, to check the current of his highest thought. 
The glow of his fancy fades with the suddenness of a southern 
sunset. His best inspirations are spoilt bv the interruption of in- 
congruous commonplace. He had none of the guardian delicacy 
of taste, or the thirst after completeness, which mark the consum- 
mate artist. He is more nearly a dwarf Shakspeare than a giant 
Pope. Tliis defect was most mischievous where he was weakest, 
in his dramas and his lyrics, least so where he was strongest, in 
his mature satires. It is almost transmuted into an excellence in 
the greatest of these, which is by design and in detail a temple of 
incongruity. 

If we turn from his manner to his matter, we cannot claim for 
Byron any absolute originality. His sources have been found in 
Rousseau, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Beaumarchais, Lauzun, Gibbon, 
Bayle, St. Pierre, Alfieri, Casti, Cuvier, La Bruyere, Wieland, 
Swift, Sterne, Le Sage, Goethe, scraps of the classics, and the 
Book of Job. Absolute originality in a late age is only possible 
to the hermit, the lunatic, or the sensation novelist. Byron, like 
the rovers before Minos, was not ashamed of his piracy. He 
transferred the random prose of his own letters and journals to his 



byron: 137 

dramas, and with the same complacency made use of the notes 
jotted down from other writers as he sailed on the Lake of Geneva. 
But'he made them his own by re-casting the rough ore into bell- 
metal. He brewed a cauldron like that of Macbeth's witches, and 
from it arose the images of crowned kings. If he did not bring a 
new idea into the world, he quadrupled tlie force of existing ideas 
and scattered them far and wide. Southern critics have main- 
tained that he had a southern nature, and was in his true element 
on the Lido or under an Andalusian night. Others dwell on the 
English pride that went along with his Italian habits and Greek 
sympathies. The truth is, he had the power of making himself 
poetically everywhere at home; and this, along with the fact of 
all his writings being perfectly intelligible, is the secret of his Eu- 
ropean influence. He was a citizen of the world ; because he not 
only painted the environs, but reflected the passions and aspira- 
tions of every scene amid whicli he dwelt. 

A disparaging critic has said, '• Byron is nothing without his 
descriptions." The remark only emphasises tlie fact tliat his 
genius was not dramatic. All non-dramatic art is concerned with 
bringing before us pictures of tlie world, the value of which lies 
half in their truth, half in the amount of human interest with which 
they are invested. To scientific accuracy few poets can lay claim, 
and Byron less tlian most : but the general truth of his descrip- 
tions is acknowledged by all who have travelled in the same coun- 
tries. Tlie Groek verses of his first pilgrimage — e. s;-, the night 
scene on the Gulf of Arta, many of the Albanian sketches, with 
much of the Siege of Corinth and the Giaour — have been invaria- 
bly commended for their vivid realism. Attention has been es- 
pecially directed to the lines in the Corsair beginning — 

" But, lo I from high Hymettus to the plain," 

as being the veritable voice of one 

" Spell-bound, within the clustering Cyclades." 

The opening lines of the same canto, transplanted from the Curse 
of Milter V a, are even more suggestive : — 

" Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run, 

■ Along Morea's hill the'settins: sun, 
Not, as in northern climes, obscurelv bright, 
But one unclouded blaze of living light," &c. 

In the same way, the later cantos of Harold ire steeped in Switz- 
erland and in Italy. Byron's genius, it is true, required a stimu- 
lus ; it could not have revelled among the daisies of Chaucer, or 
pastured by the banks of the Doon or the Ou.se, or thriven among 
the_ Lincolnshire fens. He had a sincere, if somewhat exclusive, 
delight in the storms and crags that seemed to respond to his na- 
ture and to his age. There is no affectation in the expression of 
the wish, " O that the desert were my dwelling-place ! " though we 



138 BYRON. 

know that the writer on the shores of the Mediterranean still craved 
for the gossip of the clubs. It only shows that — 

" Two desires toss about 
The poet's feverish blood ; 
One drives him to the world without. 
And one to solitude." 

Of Byron's two contemporary rivals, Wordsworth had no fever- 
ish blood ; nothing drove him to the world without ; consequently 
his " eyes avert their ken from half of human fate," and his influ- 
ence, though perennial, will always be limited. He conquered 
England from his hills and lakes ; but his spirit has never crossed 
the Straits which he thought too narrow. The other, with a fever 
in his veins, calmed it in the sea and in the cloud, and, in some 
degree because of his very excellencies, has failed as yet to mark 
the world at large. The poets' poet, the cynosure of enthusiasts, 
he bore the banner of the forlorn hope ; but Byron, with his feet 
of clay, led the ranks. Shelle}', as pure a philanthropist as St. 
Francis or Howard, could forget mankind, and, like his Adonais, 
become one with nature. Byron, who professed to hate his fel- 
lows, was of them even more than for them, and so appealed to 
them through a broader sympathy, and held them with a firmer 
hand. By virtue of his passion, as well as his power, he was en- 
abled to represent the human tragedy in which he played so many 
parts, and to which his external universe of cloudless moon.s, 
and vales of evergreen, and lightning-riven peaks, are but the vari- 
ous background. He set the "anguish, doubt, desire," the whole 
chaos of his age, to a music whose thunder-roll seems to have 
inspired the opera of Lohcjtgrin — a music not designed to teach or 
to satisfy " the budge doctors of the Stoic fur," but which will con- 
tinue to arouse and delight the sons and daughters of men. 

Madame de Stael said to Byron, at Ouchy, " It does not do to 
war with the world : the world is too strong for the individual." 
Goethe only gives a more philosophic form to this counsel when 
he remarks of the poet, "He put himself into a false position by 
his assaults on Church and State. His discontent ends in nega- 
tion. ... If I call bad bad, what do I gain ? But if I call good 
bad, I do mischief." The answer is obvious ; as long as men call 
i>ad good, there is a call for iconoclasts : half the reforms of the 
world have begun in negation. Such comments also point to the 
common error of trying to make men other than they are by lec- 
turing them. The scion of a long line of lawless bloods — a Scan- 
dinavian Berserker, if there ever was one — the literary heir of the 
Eddas — was specially created to wage that war — to smite the con- 
ventionality which is the tyrant of England with the hammer of 
Thor, and to sear with the sarcasm of Mephistopheles the hollow 
hypocrisy — sham taste, sham morals, sham religion — of the society 
by which he was surrounded and infected, and which all but suc- 
ceeded in seducing him. But for the ethereal essence — 

" The fount of fiery life 
Which served for that Titanic strife," 



B YRON. 



139 



Byron would have been merely a more melodious Moore and a 
more accomplished Brummell. But the caged lion was only half 
tamed, and his continual growls were his redemption. His rest- 
lessness was the sign of a yet unbroken will. He fell and rose, 
and fell again; but never gave up the struggle that keeps alive, if 
it does not save, the soul. His greatness^ as well as hij weakness, 
lay in the fact that from boyhood battlj was thj breath of his being. 
To tell him not to fight was like telling Wordsworth not to reflect, 
or Shelley not to sing. His instrument is a trumpet of challenge ; 
and he lived, as he appropriately died, in the progress of an unac- 
compHshed campaign. His work is neither perfect architecture 
nor fine mosaic ; but, like that of his intellectual ancestors, the 
elder Elizabethans whom he perversely maligned, it is all animated 
by the spirit of action and of enterprise. 

In good portraits his head has a lurid look, as if it had been at 
a higher temperature that that of other men. That high tempera- 
ture was the source of his inspiration, and the secret of a spell 
which, during his life, commanded homage and drew forth love. 
Mere artists are often manikins. Byron's brilliant though unequal 
genius was subordinate to the power of his personality ; he 

" Had the elements 
So mix'd in him, that Nature might stand up 
And say to all the world — ' This was a man.' " 

We may learn much from him still, when we have ceased to dis- 
parage, as our fathers ceased to idolise, a name in which there is 
so much warning and so much example. 



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.20 
.20 



289, 
290 
291 

292, 
293, 
294 
295, 
296, 
297. 

298. 





999. 


.10 


300. 


.20 




.30 


301. 


.20 


302. 


.15 


303. 


.15 


304. 




305. 


.20 


306. 




307. 


.10 


308. 


20 




.20 


309. 


15 




15 


310. 


15 


S11. 


20 


312- 


20 


313. 


20 


314. 


20 


315. 


20 


316. 


10 


317. 


10 


318. 


15 


319. 


10 


390. 


00 


321. 


.10 


322. 



267. The Haunted House. .10 

268. When the Ship Comes 

Home 10 

269. One False, both Fair.. .20 

270. Mudfog Papers 10 

271. My Novel, by Bulwer- 

Lytton. 3 parts 60 

272. Conquest of Granada. . .20 

273. Sketches by Boz 20 

274. A Christmas Carol 15 

275. lone Stewart, Linton.. .20 

276. Harold, Lytton, Parti .15 
Do., Partll 15 

377. Dora Thome , 20 

278. Maid of Athens 20 

279. The Conquest of Spain .10 

280. Pitzboodle Papers 10 

281. Brace bridge Hall 20 

282. The Uncommercial 

Traveler 20 

283. Roundabout Papers. . . .20 

284. Rossmoyne, Duchess. .20 
235. A Legend of the Rhine .10 

286. Cox's Diary 10 

287. Beyond Pardon, JJO 

288. Somebody's Luggage, 
and Mrs. Lirriper's 
Lodgings 10 

Godolphin, Lytton 20 

Salmagundi, Irving 20 

Famous Funny Fel- 
lows, Clemens .20 

Irish Sketches 20 

The Battle of Life 10 

Pilgrims of the Rhine .15 
Random Shots, Adelei .20 

Men's Wives 10 

Mystery of Edwin 

Drood, by Dickens. . . .20 
Reprinted Pieces from 

C.Dickens.... 20 

Astoria, by W. Irving. .20 
Novels by Eminent 

Hands 10 

Spanish Voyages 20 

No Thoroughfare 10 

Character Sketches... .10 

Christmas Books J30 

A Tour on the Prairies ,10 
Ballads of Thackeray.. .15 
Yellowplush Papers... .10 
Life of Mahomet, P't I .15 

Do., Part n 15 

Sketches and Travels 
in London, Thack'ray .10 

Life of Goldsmith. 20 

Capt. Bonneville 20 

Golden Girls, I Ian Muir.20 
English Humorists ... .15 
Moorisb Chronicles... .10 

Winifred Power .20 

Great Hoggarty Dia- 
mond 10 

Pansanias, Lytton .15 

The New Abelard .... .20 

AReal Queen 20 

The Rose and the Ring .20 
Wolfert's Roost, Irving .10 
Mark Seaworth 20 




II 



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